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By GEORGE STANLEY FABER, B.D. 
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By the Rev. EDWARD BURTON, M.A. 
Late Student of Christ Church College, Oxford. 

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By HUGH JAMES ROSE, B.D. 
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" ""'1 V. 

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Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 



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THE TESTIMONY OF PRIMITIVE ANTIQUITY AGAINST THE 
PECULIARITIES OF THE LATIN CHURCH: 



BEING 

A SUPPLEMENT 

TO THE 

DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM; 



IN REPLY TO 

AN ANSWER TO THE DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM, 

BY THE 

RIGHT REV. J. F. M. TREVERN, D.D. 

BISHOP OF STRASBOURG, LATE BISHOP OF AIRE. 



BY 

GEORGE STANLEY FABER, B.D. 

RECTOR OF LONG-NEWTON. 



Ut si manu viperam mulceas, venenato blandiaris aut scorpio ; petat ilia te 
movsu, hie contractus aculeum figat. Arnob. adv. gent. lib. vii. p. 229. 



LONDON: 

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and waterloo-place j pall-mall. 

1828. 




LONDON : 

PRINTED BY R. GILBERT, 
st. John's square. 



PREFACE. 



Although the Bishop of Strasbourg (late of 
Aire) was the gratuitous assailant and gene- 
ral challenger of the Anglican Church ; yet, 
throughout my Difficulties of Romanism, I 
treated him with a measure of respectful ur- 
banity and decent forbearance, which some, 
whether justly or unjustly, have pronounced to 
be excessive and superfluous. Aware of the 
mortification attendant upon even the mildest 
exposure of well-meaning insufficiency, I wished, 
by the language of studied kindness, to dimi- 
nish, so far as I was able, the galling sense of 
what truth rendered inevitable. In a word, if 
I may use an expressive, though perhaps not 
quite classical, anglicism, my honest desire was 
to let the Bishop down as gently as possible. 



iv 



PREFACE. 



To this I was induced, partly by my own 
abstract notions in regard to the proprieties of 
controversy ; partly by my respect for the Bi- 
shop's office ; and partly by the well-accredited 
report of his private character, which was made 
directly to me by the English Gentleman, who 
first brought me acquainted with the Discus- 
sal Amicale, and who strongly urged me to 
accept the challenge there triumphantly pro- 
pounded. 

The return for such courtesy has been the 
unrestrained effusion of a mighty torrent of in- 
vective and slander. We have been wont to es- 
teem the well polished sword the appropriate 
weapon of a gentleman : but the Bishop inclines 
to prefer the obtuseness of the bludgeon or the 
deformity of the tomahawk. Each of these, 
no doubt, is a very effective weapon in its way: 
but, with us in England, I believe, they are 
not generally admitted into good company. 
In France, however, it may be different : and, 
as there is no accounting for tastes, I presume 
not to dispute the accuracy of that, which by 
his lordship has been so prominently displayed. 
9 



PREFACE. 



v 



Far be from me the preposterous vanity of 
claiming to enact the arbiter elegantiarum to 
the Bishop of Strasbourg. 

I regret, that, in one part of his Answer, my 
opponent should have thought it necessary to 
enter upon the politics of Ireland. From this 
subject I had myself systematically abstained : 
and, from the even tenor of my way, the Bishop 
shall not now tempt me to depart. Indepen- 
dently of all other considerations, I am at a loss 
to perceive, how the case of Ireland bears upon 
the real question at issue between his lordship 
and myself. England may, for aught I know, 
be dreadfully intolerant ; because, while she 
interferes with no man's religious opinions, she 
refuses political power to a Church, which, pro- 
fessing to be immutable, has thence very 
consistently never rescinded the well-known 
conciliar decrees imperative of heretical perse- 
cution : but the intolerance of England and the 
injuries of Ireland tend not, so far as I can dis- 
cern, even in the slightest degree, to demon- 
strate, what the Bishop has specially under- 
taken to demonstrate, that All the leading 



vi 



PREFACE. 



peculiarities of the modern Latin Church 
were, in the first instance, authoritatively in- 
culcated by Christ and his Apostles 1 . 

LONG-NEWTON RECTORY, 
April 16, 1828. 

1 While the Bishop's pen was in his hand, I marvel, that 
he did not forcibly contrast the bigotted tyranny of Eng- 
land, as displayed both individually and collectively toward 
the much-enduring Irish Romanists, with the eminently 
mild and liberal and conciliatory and paternal conduct of 
the King of Sardinia toward his notoriously turbulent 
subjects the Vaudois. Why did he not make the proud 
Island-Queen blush by directing or forcing her attention to 
the boundless civil and political privileges, which have been 
showered, with a rare profusion, upon the ill-deserving 
valleys of Piedmont ? That were indeed a theme worthy 
of his lordship's eloquence. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

A STATEMENT OF THE REAL QUESTION AT ISSUE 
BETWEEN THE BISHOP OF STRASBOURG AND THE 
RECTOR OF LONG-NEWTON 1 

CHAPTER II. 

MISREPRESENTATION, INFALLIBILITY, PRESCRIPTION . . 26 

CHAPTER III. 

TRANSUBSTANTIATION 44 

CHAPTER IV. 

MISCELLANEOUS 123 



CHAPTER I. 



A STATEMENT OF THE REAL QUESTION AT ISSUE BE- 
TWEEN THE BISHOP OF STRASBOURG AND THE 
RECTOR OF LONG-NEWTON. 

The Bishop of Strasbourg's Discussion Amicale, 
originally (as I now first learn from Mr. Husen- 
beth) published in England during the course of 
the French Revolution, and subsequently repub- 
lished in France in the year 1824, though an un- 
provoked attack upon the Anglican Church, and 
though containing a somewhat offensive challenge 
to the Anglican Clergy, would never have been 
answered by myself ; had I not been earnestly 
called upon to undertake the task by an English 
layman of family and fortune, who transmitted to 
me his lordship's volumes from the continent. 
Until the receipt of Mr. Massingberd's letter, / 
was ignorant of their very existence : and, even 
had I known it, I should have thought it more 
decorous to leave the labour of a Reply to some 
one of the many able men in my own Church 
whose ecclesiastical rank approximated more 
closely to that of the Gallican Prelate. But, 
when thus called upon, I did not feel at liberty to 
refuse : and, in consequence, I found myself, quite 

B 



2 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



£cHAP. I. 



unexpectedly and not very willingly, placed in a 
situation which of right belonged to my betters. 
The Bishop, in consequence of the much too 
flattering importunity of our friend Mr. Massing- 
berd \ has at length ceased to despise my humi- 
lity : and, through the respectable agency of Mr. 
Husenbeth, he has recently honoured my Diffi- 
culties of Romanism with a professed Answer. 

To prevent that indistinctness of conception, 
which is apt to arise from controversy when suf- 
fered to expatiate into discursiveness, it will be 
useful, both precisely to state the real question at 
issue between the Bishop and myself, and to point 
out its true bearing upon the matter in debate. 

I. The real question at issue between us is the 
following. 

"WHETHER THE PECULIARITIES OF THE ROMAN 
CHURCH WERE, OR WERE NOT, TAUGHT, IN THE FIRST 
INSTANCE, BY CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES. 

This, and this only, is the real question be- 
tween us : for, as to the canonical authority of 

1 See Answer to the Diffic. of Roman, by the Bishop of 
Strasbourg, p. 1, 2. I thank Mr. Massingberd very sincerely 
for his favourable opinion of me : but most persons, I fear, will 
think, that he has rated my talents and my acquirements far too 
highly. He has, however, never suffered the Bishop to rest, 
until he compelled him to answer my Difficulties of Romanism : 
and I am willing to hope, that the cause of religious truth will 
thence be promoted. Should it unhappily suffer in my hands, 
the Bishop will have the goodness to understand, that, in our 
Anglican Church (if I may be allowed to adapt the words of a 
fine old ballad), " there are five hundred" better than myself. 



CHAP, i/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



3 



the Church of England, it has no direct concern 
with it ; nor do I think it in any wise necessary 
here to resume a discussion of that authority. 

The question, then, between the Bishop and 
myself, is purely a question of fact. His lord- 
ship fearlessly takes up the affirmative : I, on the 
contrary, have ventured to defend the negative. 

Such is the true statement of the matter liti- 
gated : and hence it is quite obvious, that, what- 
ever does not bear upon this precise point is alto- 
gether discursive and irrelative. 

Thus, when the Bishop, in his Answer to me, 
is large and copious upon the evil characters of 
Luther and Calvin and Zwingle and the reform- 
ers of the sixteenth century, and when he would 
adduce various of our own divines as favourable 
to the doctrine of Transubstantiation, I do not 
feel myself at all bound to follow him : because I 
am utterly unable to discern the demonstrative 
utility of such extravagation. The reformers in 
question, if we may believe the Bishop, were par- 
ticularly bad persons. Be it so : but what then ? 
Do their alleged misdemeanors demonstrate, that 
Christ and his Apostles enjoined upon the faith- 
ful, as their bounden duty, the practice of Image- 
worship and Saint-worship and Cross-worship 
and Relic-worship. Some of our English divines 
also, if we may credit the Bishop, were admirers 
of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Be it so : 
but what then ? Do their individual speculations, 
even if accurately Represented by his lordship, 

b 2 



4 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. Is 



either compromise the Church of England, or 
prove that Christ and his Apostles delivered 
that doctrine to the primitive Church 1 f The 

1 Even in stating this alleged circumstance, Dr. Trevern 
cannot refrain from his familiar habit of interested misrepre- 
sentation. 

After citing Bishop Andrews and Bishop Forbes as maintain- 
ing that Christ is to be adored in the Eucharist, he proceeds to 
villify our Church, for the pretended inconsistency of what he is 
pleased to term her sacrilegious proscription of the adoration of 
the Eucharist, in the concluding notice suffixed to the Commu- 
nion Service. Answer, p. 96, 97. 

Can this officious censurer of his neighbours discover no dif- 
ference, between adoring Christ as spiritually present in the 
Eucharist, and adoring the Eucharist itself on the professed 
ground that it is transubstantiated into the corporeal flesh 
and blood of Christ ? 

The first is the doctrine of the Church of England, as it is 
excellently and scripturally explained in the codicil to the Com- 
munion Service : the last is the doctrine of the Church of Rome, 
as propounded by the Council of Trent. 

Nullus itaque dubitandi locus relinquitur, quin omnes Christi 
fideles, pro more in Catholica Ecclesia semper recepto, Latriae 
cultum, qui vero Deo debetur, huic sanctissimo sacramento in 
veneratione exhibeant. Concil. Trident, sess. xiii. can. 5. 

With the impudent falsehood, respecting an alleged historical 
fact, advanced by this decision, I have no present concern : it 
is sufficient for me now to observe, that, against such " idolatry 
" to be abhorred of all faithful Christians" (as our Church ex- 
presses herself), not against the devout adoration of the second 
person of the Holy Trinity as spiritually present, the codicil is 
avowedly directed. 

I may add, that any allegation of inconsistency against our 
English Divines, even if inconsistency existed, comes with a pe- 
culiarly bad grace from a Latin Ecclesiastic. Who so sore and 



CHAP. 1.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



5 



Bishop undertakes to shew the positive antiquity 
and the apostolical institution of the peculiarities 

so thin-skinned upon this very point, as those modern Romanists 
whose domiciles are exposed to the troublesome light of the 
Reformation ? If we adduce any of the gross monstrosities of 
their own writers*, we are forthwith reminded of the dreadful 
illiberality of such conduct : and we are told, that the Catholic 
Church, as they are wont to call the Western Patriarchate, is 
no way answerable for the unauthorised assertions of her chil- 
dren. But the Bishop of Strasbourg, forsooth, must be bound 
by no such restraint. Free as air, and liberal as the day, he 
may justly deem the Church of England accountable for every 
opinion advanced by any clergyman at any period. Now I 
would have him and all other gentlemen of the same stamp to 
know, that the Church of England pledges herself for nothing, 
save what is distinctly expressed in her Articles, Homilies, and 
Liturgy. Even if he could produce a transubstantialist among 
us, what then ? Am / more answerable for the unwarranted 
speculations of such an individual, than he would willingly con- 
sider himself answerable for the rank and open, though (so far 
as I know) uncensured, idolatry of James Naclantus Bishop of 
Clugium in the sixteenth century ? See the avowed statement 
of this shameless idolater in my Diff. of Rom. p. 256, 257. I 
gave it, as the natural and necessary conclusion from the dog- 
mata of the second Nicene Council: and Dr. Trevern, very 
prudently, pretermits the whole in his Answer. 

Not thus, however, does he deal with my Extracts from the 
idolatrous Hours for the use of Salisbury as printed at Paris in 
the year 1520. Bishop Burnet, to whom I made my acknow- 
ledgments for them, has given them at full length in their origi- 
nal monkish jingling Latin ; with most regular and precise re- 
ferences, both chapter and verse, to the books then actually 
before him. Under such circumstances, what is to be done ? 
No evasion here is practicable. The saints are not supplicated 
merely to intercede for their votaries : but they are prayed to, 



6 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP, I. 



of the Latin Church : and he is copious upon the 
alleged unrighteousness of the reformers in the 
sixteenth century and upon the alleged specula- 
tions of certain yet more modern divines of the 
Church of England. In the discussion of a mere 
question of fact, can I be expected to follow his 
lordship, whenever he is pleased to amuse himself 
with thus actively travelling out of the record? 
Excursions of this kind, which can serve no end 
save to divert the attention of the reader from the 
true point of litigation, always lead me to suspect, 
that they are undertaken by no means without 
very good and sufficient reasons. 

II. As I must request the patient inquirer to 
bear distinctly in his mind the real question at 
issue between the Bishop and myself; so must I 
likewise beg him carefully to note its true bearing 
upon the matter in debate. 

1. All parties, whose friends are engaged in 
litigating any theological topic, are abundantly 
apt to compliment themselves by claiming the 
victory ; a clear proof, no ci^oubt, that it actually 
belongs to them, since they themselves positively 

in downright good earnest, to grant those gifts and graces and 
blessings which God only can confer. See my DifT. of Rom. 
p. 231 — 234. What, we may well ask, is now to be done ? In 
a violent rage, Bishop Trevern turns round and gives Bishop 
Burnet the lie to his teeth. See the summary process of cutting 
this Gordyan knot in his lordship's Answer, p. 407—411. We 
may pity, though we cannot refrain from smiling at, this impo- 
tent petulance. 



CHAP. I.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



7 



declare such to be the case : and, in this laudable 
and most highly convincing procedure, the gen- 
tlemen of the Latin Church, so far as my own ob- 
servation extends, are in no wise behind the gen- 
tlemen of other communions. Hence, assuredly, 
by his friends at least, the Bishop of Strasbourg 
will be declared to have amply demolished his 
Anglican antagonist. 

Now let us, for a moment, grant, that such is 
really the case : let it be conceded, that I have 
failed of establishing the negative side of the 
question now before us. What then ? Because / 
have failed, through want of existing materials, to 
establish the negative of the question ; does it 
quite logically follow, that the Bishop has there- 
fore succeeded in establishing its affirmative ? I 
venture to think not. 

Certainly, as I confess to my shame, I cannot 
prove, from the express words of Justin Martyr 
(for instance), that that very early Father rejected 
the doctrine of Purgatory. But my honestly ac- 
knowledged inability to prove, from his own 
words, Justin's rejection of the doctrine, does not 
bring the Bishop a single step nearer to any de- 
monstration that Justin maintained the doctrine. 
The truth is, that the worthy Father says not a 
syllable about the matter : an ominous silence, 
which may peradventure benefit me, but which by 
no possibility can avail the Bishop. 

Thus, palpably, the establishment of an af- 
firmative is not the necessary consequence of 



8 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. I. 



the non-establishment of a negative. Let it be 
supposed, that / had never written a single line : 
would the Bishop have thence been any nearer 
the establishment of the affirmative of our ques- 
tion ? Clearly not. He calls upon us members 
of the Anglican Church to join the communion of 
the Latin Church, on the express and avowed 
ground, that Christ and his Apostles, from the 
very first, inculcated the several doctrines and 
practices of Transubstantiation, Purgatory, 
Prayers for the dead in Purgatory, Indid- 
gences, Infallibility, Image-worship, Relic-wor- 
ship, Saint-worship, and Cross-worship : and he 
contends, that, in consequence of such aboriginal 
inculcation, the Catholic Church, from the age of 
the Apostles downward, has immutably main- 
tained and upheld those and the like various doc- 
trines and practices l . Under such circumstances, 

1 His lordship does not venture to enumerate among them 
the withholding the cup from the Laity. We have here a pre- 
cious specimen of the zeal wherewith the immutable and infalli- 
ble Church upholds primitive antiquity. On this point, match- 
less is the impudence of the ecumenical Council of Constance. 

" Since, in some parts of the world," say the Fathers of that 
. celebrated Synod, " certain persons presume rashly to assert, 
" the Christian People ought to receive the holy sacrament of 
" the Eucharist under each form both of bread and wine ; and 
" since they administer it every where to the Laity, not only 
" under the form of bread but also under the form of wine, and 
" that too even after supper and when the communicant is 
" not fasting ; and since they pertinaciously assert that it ought 
" thus to be administered, contrary to the laudable custom of 



CHAP, ij DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



9 



the onus prohandi clearly rests with the Bishop. 
Let him prove his large assertion : and the dis- 
pute is at an end. 

" the Church reasonably approved of, which, as if it were sa- 
" crilegious, they damnably attempt to reprobate : on these 
" grounds, this present sacred general Council of Constance, 
" lawfully congregated in the Holy Spirit, labouring to provide 
" for the health of the faithful against this error, the mature de- 
" liberation of many men learned both in divine and in human 
" law being previously had, declares, decrees, and defines, that, 
" although Christ after supper instituted and administered to 
" his disciples this venerable sacrament under each form both 
" of bread and of wine ; yet, notwithstanding this circum- 
" stance, the laudable authority of the sacred canons, and the 
" approved custom of the Church, has preserved and does pre- 
" serve, that this sacrament ought not to be administered after 
" supper nor to be received by the faithful save fasting, except 
" in case of infirmity or of some other necessity, granted or ad- 
" mitted by law or the Church. And, as this custom has been 
" reasonably introduced to avoid certain dangers and scandals, 
" the Council decrees, that, although in the primitive 
" church this sacrament was received by the faithful under 
" each form ; hereafter it shall be received, by those who ad- 
" minister it, under both forms, but by the Laity under the form 
" of bread only : inasmuch as we ought firmly to believe and in 
" no wise to doubt, that the whole body and blood of Christ 
" are truly contained, as well under the form of bread, as under 
" the form of wine. Whence, since this custom has been rea- 
" sonably introduced and very long observed by the Church and 
" the holy Fathers, it ought to be esteemed as a law, which 
" must not be reprobated or arbitrarily changed without the 
" authority of the Church. To assert, therefore, that the ob- 
" servance of this custom or law is sacrilegious or unlawful, 
" ought to be deemed erroneous : and those, who pertinaciously 
" assert the opposite to the above premises, are to be driven 



10 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[[chap. I. 



But where is his proof? Doubtless he es- 
tablishes, what no person ever thought of deny- 

" away, and grievously punished as heretics, by the diocesans 
" of the places or their officials or the inquisitors of heretical 
" pravity in the kingdoms or provinces in which any thing shall 
" be attempted or presumed contrary to this decree, according 
" to the canonical and lawful sanctions, in favour of the Catholic 
" Faith salubriously invented against heretics and their abet- 
" tors." Concil. Constan. sess. xiii. Labb. Concil. Sacros. vol. 
xii. p. 100. 

Here we have an infallible Council, unblushingly framing a 
decree against both the acknowledged institution of Christ him- 
self and the acknowledged practice of the primitive Church : 
while, with a burst of impiety absolutely portentous, it enacts, 
that those, who prefer the authority of Christ to the authority 
of the Council, shall be esteemed heretics, and as such shall be 
grievously punished by the inquisitors of heretical pravity. 

My chief object, however, for adducing this decree, is to 
shew the strength of the notable argument, which pervades the 
whole of the Bishop's two productions. Whatever doctrine or 
practice can be shewn to have at any time existed in the 
Church, that doctrine or practice must be piously believed to 
have been inculcated by Christ and his Apostles. Such is the 
mode, in which the Bishop invariably demonstrates the positive 
antiquity of the peculiarities of his communion. They certainly 
existed in the sixth or seventh or eighth century : therefore 
they must have existed in the apostolic age, and must have 
been instituted by Christ and his Apostles. Now the Council 
of Constance has demonstrated to our entire satisfaction, that a 
matter may, at a subsequent age, have been introduced into the 
Church, not only without the authority of Christ, but against 
it. Yet, because I refuse to admit the conclusiveness of the 
Bishop's argument, and because I call upon him for direct proofs 
from the earliest ecclesiastical writers ; he reviles me in good 
set terms, calls me an esprit forty and professes himself tempted 



CHAP, i/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



11 



ing, the relative or comparative antiquity of those 
doctrines and practices : but, throughout the en- 
tire of his lordship's volumes, his Answer to my- 
self inclusive, I vainly seek for any proof of their 
positive or absolute antiquity. They all, by a 
species of agglomeration very easily accounted 
for, come dropping in, some in this age and some 
in that age, but invariably too late. One of them 
peradventure may be too late by half a dozen 
centuries ; while another of more respectable an- 
tiquity may be too late by no more than two or 
three centuries : but, in each case alike, the con- 
necting link is always wanted. Cyril of Alexan- 
dria and the Emperor Julian are very good autho- 
rity for the Cross-worship of the fourth and fifth 
centuries : but they are exceedingly bad autho- 
rity for the Cross-worship of the apostolic age. 
To prove his point, the Bishop ought never to 
have produced a single witness later, at the very 
latest, than the first Council of Nice. I could 
readily pardon his commencing with a Father of 
the fifth or sixth or seventh century merely as a 
starting point, if he had thence worked his way 

to think that I have served an apprenticeship in the school of 
Voltaire. My sole fault is, that I cannot receive an alleged 
fact without adequate historical evidence. The Bishop has- 
undertaken to demonstrate the fact, that all the 'peculiarities 
of the Latin Church were inculcated by Christ and his Apos- 
tles. I tell him, with the utmost mildness, that his proof is a 
failure. And, in return, he spits in my face, and calls me 
horse. 

12 



12 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[[chap. V. 



backward, step by step, up to the very age of 
Christ and his Apostles : but, without such a pro- 
cess, I really cannot discern, how his needlessly 
copious citations from the later Fathers serve at 
all to establish his position. The incipient traces 
of a Purgatory, though of a Purgatory quite irre- 
concileable with the modern Purgatory of the 
Latins, we may discover in sundry hesitating pas- 
sages of Augustine 1 : but this is no proof, that 
any such doctrine was taught by Christ and his 
Apostles. I have myself doggedly read, from be- 
ginning to end, by far the greatest part of the an- 
tenicene Fathers, out of whom alone the Bishop's 
proofs ought to have been selected : and I believe 
I may say, that there is not a single one of those 
earlier Fathers, with whose writings I am alto- 
gether unacquainted. Hence I venture to speak 
with some measure of positiveness. Knowing, 
then, reasonably well, the ground, from the ex- 
elusive produce of which the Bishop's affirmative 
must be established ; I assert, without hesitation, 
that, from such produce, it never can be estab- 
lished. The fault rests not with the Bishop, but 
with his lack of evidence. He has done, what 
man could do, for the honour and glory of his 
Church : but, still, Ex nihilo, nihil fit. I mean 
not to say, that no vestiges of Latin peculiarities 
can be discovered anterior to the first Nicene 
Council which sat in the year 325 : but this I 

1 See my Diff. of Rom. book i. chap. xiv. ^ III. p. 208—213. 



CHAP. I.^ DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



13 



will say, that, by no machinery hitherto invented, 
can the Bishop make those peculiarities touch 
the age of Christ and his Apostles. The several 
chains are invariably too short : and, with the 
last link of each, we always see intwined the 
canon of Tertullian ; Whatever is first, is true ; 
whatever is later, is spurious. 

Nor is this the whole of his lordship's infelicity. 
As he can extract no proof of his affirmative from 
the only ground, where, on the principles of his- 
torical evidence, he can legitimately seek it : so, 
the lower he descends, the more irretrievably 
hopeless will his cause become. A witness for 
Transubstantiation from the fourth century, if 
any such remarkable personage exist, is quite 
useless to the Bishop; because any evidence, 
that such a speculation then existed, will obvi- 
ously not prove its apostolically ratified existence 
in the first century : but a witness against 
Transubstantiation even of the fifth or sixth or 
seventh century, who in his testimony professes 
to speak the familiar sense of Orthodoxy personi- 
fied, is immensely valuable to his opponent ; be- 
cause the proof of its non-reception by the Ca- 
tholic Church, in those later centuries, estab- 
lishes, a fortiori, its non-reception in yet earlier 
ages. If the collective Church be attested to 
have known nothing of the doctrine in the fifth 
century ; we may be quite sure, that it was not 
better informed in the first. As time rolled on, 
the doctrine, when once started, might be gradu- 



14 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. I. 



ally adopted : but, if universally known in all the 
successions of the Churches to have been from 
the first taught , by Christ and his Apostles, it 
never could, in the fifth age, have been universally 
exploded. 

Thus I will venture to assert, that, even if I 
should have failed in establishing the negative of 
the question, the Bishop will not, on that account, 
be one jot nearer to his projected establishment 
of the affirmative. He calls upon us to join the 
Latin Church, on the express ground, that Christ 
and his Apostles inculcated Transubstantiation, 
and Purgatory, and Saint-worship, and Image- 
worship, and the like. So far, so good : but 
where is the Bishop's historical proof of the al- 
leged fact ? I am not quick-sighted enough to 
discover it, either in his original Work, or in 
his Answer to myself. It may haply exist in the 
metaphysical region of Posse : but I vainly la- 
bour to discover it in the practical region of Esse. 
The Bishop, we will say, has quite demolished 
my unlucky self : but my annihilation brings him 
no nearer to the end of his painful pilgrimage. 
Proof we have none : but assertion, if that will 
satisfy the historical inquirer, we have in rich 
abundance. Our Latin brethren, if it so please 
them, may freely believe, that the peculiarities of 
their Church were inculcated by Christ and his 
Apostles : but, in that case, even to say the very 
least of it, they believe without evidence. Some 
probably will think, that they believe against it : 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



15 



but, at all events, they most assuredly believe 
without it. 

2. These remarks may be somewhat unpleasant 
to the Bishop and his admirers : the fault, how- 
ever, is not mine. If a man undertakes to es- 
tablish a fact, and if the testimony which he 
brings is altogether insufficient for his purpose ; 
he must not be out of humour, when he finds 
that no conviction is produced in the mind of a 
sober and cautious inquirer. Any person, who 
has paid the slightest attention to the nature of 
historical evidence, will readily perceive, that the 
Bishop's witnesses are quite insufficient to estab- 
lish the fact for which he contends. Yet, unless 
the peculiarities of the Latin Church were actu- 
ally taught and enforced by Christ and his Apos- 
tles, where is their authority? Some of them 
may possess a measure of relative antiquity : but, 
unless the Bishop can make good their claim to 
positive antiquity, that is to say, unless he can 
prove their original inculcation by Christ and his 
Apostles ; it matters not, when they were intro- 
duced. In failure of the requisite proof, they are 
mere unauthorised figments of men : and cer- 
tainly, as yet, such a proof is a theological desi- 
deratum. It is true, indeed, that the large faith 
of a thorough-bred Romanist will believe any 
thing, which is inculcated by the imaginary infal- 
libility of his own western provincial Church : 
but, as such a compendious demonstration weighs 
lighter than dust in the balance with an unfettered 



16 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



£CHAP. I. 



Anglican ; so the Bishop himself, in the avowed 
construction of both his Works, has virtually re- 
linquished it. He calls upon us to receive the 
motley peculiarities of the Latin Church on the 
precise and express ground, that, by adequate 
historical testimony, he will demonstrate them to 
have been authoritatively delivered, to the very 
first generation of believers, by Christ and his 
Apostles their own proper selves. Hence (with 
what measure of prudence, is quite another ques- 
tion) he avowedly rests the whole matter upon 
evidence. To evidence he has appealed : by 
evidence he must be judged. His testimony I 
have studied with close attention and with eager 
curiosity : but, as for any proof of the fact which 
he would establish, we shall probably find it, with 
sundry other curious res deperditce, in that same 
lunar region, where the adventurous Astolfo was 
fortunate enough to discover the long-lost donation 
of the good Constantine \ 

1 I greatly wish, that the Bishop, who is such a stickler for 
the immutability of the Church both in doctrine and in practice 
ever since the time of Christ and his Apostles, would read the 
admirable Discourse on Ecclesiastical History by an eminent 
member of his own Church, the learned and singularly impartial 
Fleury. His judicious remarks upon the innovations, which 
rapidly sprang up in the Latin Church (as he himself contra- 
distinguishes it from the Greek Church) through the papal 
adoption of the forged Decretals, may well be extended to the 
singular line of inconclusive argument which unhappily pervades 
the whole of the Bishop's Compositions. " The evil," says he, 
" came from an error in fact : from taking that to be an cient, 



CHAP, ij DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



17 



Peradventure the Bishop may say, that I over- 
charge the picture : peradventure he may say, 
that he did not absolutely promise and vow to 
demonstrate, that Christ and his Apostles them- 
selves inculcated Transubstantiation, Infallibility, 
Purgatory, Prayers for the dead now in Purga- 
tory, Indulgences purchased by money, Image- 
worship, Saint-worship, Cross-worship, and Relic- 
worship. 

I certainly understood his lordship to contend, 
that all these peculiarities were inculcated by 
Christ and his Apostles, and that from that origi- 
nation they derived their binding authority. But, if 
the Bishop wishes in any wise to retract or to qua- 
lify, far be it from me to throw any impediments 
in his way. Let him, however, observe, that the 
surrender of this vital point is, to all intents and 
purposes, a full surrender of the entire question. 
Christ and his Apostles either did, or did not, in- 
culcate the peculiarities of the Latin Church. If 
the Bishop asserts, that they did : let him prove 
the alleged fact by competent historical testi- 
mony. If he allows, in any single instance, that 
they did not : he so far acknowledges these same 
peculiarities to be mere human figments, later, in 
point of origin, than the apostolic age. 

3. At the close of these remarks, I subjoin a 

" which was novel. 5 ' The English reader will find a transla- 
tion of this valuable Discourse in Jortin's Remarks on Eccles. 
Hist. vol. iii. p. 254—301. I shall give the heads of it below. 
See Chap. iv. § IV. note. 



18 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. I. 



specimen of the Bishop's mode of establishing an 
alleged historical fact. 

The fact to be established is the institution of 
Image-worship by Christ and his Apostles : the 
process, adopted by the Bishop, is the following. 

(1.) In the year 814, Euthymius of Sardes, 
remarks his lordship, thus addressed Leo the 
iconoclast. 

" Know, Sire, that, for 800 years and more 
" since Jesus Christ came into the world, he has 
" been painted and adored in his image. Who 
" will be bold enough to abolish so ancient a tra- 
" dition T 

Who indeed ? triumphantly responds the Bi- 
shop : why no less a personage, than the sceptical 
Rector of Long-Newton K 

Such, in point of chronological antiquity, is the 
opening of the Bishop's evidence. A most vera- 
cious witness, it seems, who had the advantage of 
living in the year 814, gravely assures the hereti- 
cal Emperor, that Christ had then been adored in 
his image more than eight centuries. Our Lord, 
therefore, if we may safely credit Euthymius of 
Sardes, must have instituted this species of image- 
worship before he had attained the age of four- 
teen years; probably about the time when he 
conversed with the doctors in the temple, certainly 
before he had made a single disciple : and the 
Bishop is quite scandalised at the Rector of Long- 



1 Answer, p. 27. 



CHAP. 1.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 19 

Newton, because he, the said Rector, presumes to 
doubt as to the fact thus invincibly established by 
tradition. 

(2.) Basil, however, in the fourth century, shall 
be called in to the aid of the chronologer Euthy- 
mius in the ninth \ 

I have not this writer at hand to consult : but, 
as his evidence is exhibited even by the Bishop 
himself, the tradition, like an industrious snow- 
ball, seems to have been rapidly increasing since 
his time. In the ninth century, apostolical tradi- 
tion enabled Euthymius to testify, that the painted 
image of Christ had been relatively adored ever 
since our Lord was twelve years old : but, in the 
latter half of the fourth century, it only taught 
Basil (as the Bishop states his evidence), that he 
ought to revere and honour the images of the 
saints. 

(3.) Yet, even in the time of Basil, the snowball 
had made a very respectable progress since it 
first set out upon its journey. Tertullian, who 
nourished about the year 200, and whose next- 
produced evidence the Bishop whimsically enough 
pronounces to be of the highest antiquity, inti- 
mates, it seems, that the cups of the Christians, 
'probably their sacred chalices, were in his days 
embossed with a representation of the good 
Shepherd bearing home the lost sheep on his shoul- 
ders 2 . 



1 Answer, p. 26, 27. 2 Answer, p. 27, 28. 

c 2 • 



20 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. I. 



Such is the testimony of Tertullian : and his 
lordship is most heartily welcome to it, if it will 
be of the least manner of service to him. In this 
notable proof of primitive Image-worship, not a 
syllable does Tertullian say, either about apos- 
tolic tradition or about actual adoration: but 
the Bishop is so delighted with such a formidable 
demonstration of his fact, that he absolutely (I 
am sorry to say) charges me with having dis- 
honestly suppressed it ; though, as the curious 
reader may easily satisfy himself by ocular in- 
spection, I have, in my Difficulties of Romanism, 
accurately adduced and abundantly commented 
upon even the ipsissima verba of the learned and 
eloquent African K 

Here his lordship's evidence for the fact, that 
Image-worship was established by Christ and 
his Apostles, suddenly stops short. But what 
then ? Why need we advance a single step be- 
yond the highest antiquity of the year 200 ; 
when Tertullian so distinctly proves the Image- 
worship of that very early period, by testifying 

1 See my DifT. of Rom. p. 277, 278. The precise words of 
Tertullian, from which the Bishop learns that Christians, at the 
end of the second and the beginning of the third century, wor- 
shipped images, are these. 

A parabolis lieebit incipias, ubi est ovis perdita a Domino re- 
quisita et humeris ejus reveeta. Procedant ipsae picturse cali- 
cum vestrorum. Tertull. de Pudic. Oper. p. 748. 

To extract Image-worship from this passage is certainly a 
most splendid example of the quidlibt t ex quolibet. 



CHAP. I.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



21 



that the probably sacramental cups of the day 
were ornamentally embossed by a figure of the 
good Shepherd bearing home the lost sheep upon 
his shoulders ? What would we have more to 
satisfy us, that Image-worship was originally in- 
stituted by Christ and his Apostles ? 

" This sentence of Tertullian," says the Bishop, 
" appeared to me, in 1812, a ray of light for our 
" cause." 

At that memorable era, his lordship first disco- 
vered the golden sentence ; which, out of sheer 
fright, the Rector of Long-Newton dishonestly 
suppressed. It appeared to him a ray of light 
for the good cause. Verily it is a ray in the 
midst of surrounding darkness. 

But why did the Bishop stop short with Ter- 
tullian ? Why did he not gradually work his way 
up to the fountain-head ? Why did he not prove 
his fact from the combined testimony of Cle- 
ment of Alexandria, Ireneus, Athenagoras, Justin, 
Polycarp, Clement of Rome, and Scripture ? He 
knew, that he could not : and therefore he very 
prudently stayed his course, that he might the 
more leisurely contemplate the brilliant ray of 
light emitted by Tertullian at the close of the 
second century. 

4. The reader has seen the Bishop's case for 
the affirmative : let him now, in equity, attend to 
my case for the negative. 

In despite of the apostolical tradition which 
enabled Euthymius of Sardes to bring out a result 



22 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. I. 



which no one save the Rector of Long-Newton 
would venture to controvert, both Celsus and 
Minucias Felix and Origen distinctly testify to the 
historical fact, that the Christians of the second 
and third centuries neither employed images, nor 
worshipped them. 

Celsus nourished in the course of the second 
century : Origen, in the course of the third. As 
the latter has preserved and answered the objection 
of the former, he affords to us a double testimony 
for two succeeding ages. Celsus had vitupera- 
tively remarked, that Christians abhorred the set- 
ting up of images l . In reply, Origen acknow- 
ledges and defends the circumstance. " We 
" ought not," says he, " to dedicate images con- 
" structed by the ingenuity of artizans : the best 
" images are those formed by God's word within 
" us ; namely, the exemplars of justice and tem- 
" perance and manliness and wisdom and piety 
" and all the other virtues 2 ." 

Exactly the same is the attestation of Minucius 
Felix about the year 220. In his very interest- 
ing Dialogue entitled Octavius, the pagan dis- 
putant Cecilius triumphantly asks his opponent, 
why Christians had no known images 3 . Octa- 
vius, in answer, confesses and vindicates the 

1 'O KeXaoQ tyrjaiv, yfiag fjoyfiovg teal ayaXjuara kcu vetog idpvff- 
6ai (pevyeiv. Orig. cont. Cels. lib. viii. p. 389. 

2 Ibid. p. 389. 

3 Cur nullas aras habent, templa nulla, nulla nota simulachra. 
Min. Fel. Octav. p. 91,92. 



CHAP. I.]] v DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



23 



fact : while he ridicules, with just contempt, both 
the manufactory and the adoration of such sense- 
less puppets \ 

1 Ibid. p. 217—221, 286, 313—318. See also Arnob. adv. 
gent. lib. vi. p. 189. Lactant. Div. Instit. lib. ii. § 2. It is a 
curious circumstance, that, in the line of argument pursued by 
Arnobius against the image-worship of the Pagans, he combats 
that identical plea of relative adoration, which was set up by 
the second or idolatrous Council of Nice, and which is warmly 
patronised by the Bishop of Strasbourg. 

Deos, inquitis, per simulachra veneramur. Quid ergo, si 
haec non sint, coli se dii nesciunt, nec impertiri a vobis ullum 
sibi existimabunt honorem ? Per tramites ergo quosdam, et 
per quEedam fidei commissa, ut dicitur, vestras sumunt atque 
accipiunt cultiones : et, antequam hi sentiant quibus illud de- 
betur obsequium, simulachris litatis prius, et velut reliquias 
quasdam aliena ad illos ex auctoritate transmittitis. Et quid 
fieri potis est injuriosius, contumeliosius, durius, quam deum 
alterum scire, et rei alterse supplicare : opem sperare de numine, 
et nullius sensus ad effigiem deprecari ? Nonne illud est, 
quaeso, quod, in vulgaribus proverbiis, dicitur : fabrum csedere, 
cum ferias fullonem: et, cum hominis consilium quseras, ab 
asellis et porculis agendarum sententias postulare ? Arnob. adv. 
gent. lib. vi. p. 195. 

The identical relative I mage- worship, which in principle is 
so absurd as adopted by a Pagan, suddenly becomes, under the 
plastic hands of the second Nicene Council, a most rational and 
edifying practice when adopted by a Christian. 

We further learn from this mischievous Arnobius, that the 
very same speculation respecting the actual occupancy of a 
consecrated image by its supposed prototype, which was after- 
ward taken up by christian iconolaters, had already been 
adopted by their pagan predecessors. 

Sed erras, inquitis, et laberis : nam neque nos cera, neque 
auri argentique materias, neque alias quibus signa confiunt> 
eas esse per se deos y et religiosa decernimus numina ; sed eos in 



24 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. !• 



" Who/' says Euthymius, " will be bold enough 
" to abolish so ancient a tradition V 

his colimus, eosque veneramur, quos dedicatio infert sacra, et 
fabrilibus efficit inhabitare simulachris. Non improba neque 
aspernabilis ratio, qua possit quivis tardus necnon et pruden- 
tissimus credere, deos, relictis sedibus propriis, id est coelo, non 
recusare, nec fugere, habitacula inire terrena : quinimo, jure 
dedicationis impulsos, simulachrorum coalescere junctioni. In 
gypso ergo mansitant, atque in testulis, dii vestri ? Quinimo 
testularum et gypsi, mentes, spiritus, atque animse, dii sunt ? 
Atque, ut fieri augustiores vilissimse res possint, concludi se 
patiuntur et in sedis obscurse coercitatione latitare ? Arnob. 
adv. gent. lib. vi. p. 203. 

The ridicule, heaped by Arnobius upon the pagan speculation, 
is just as applicable to the self-same speculation, when it trans- 
migratively reappears in the Latin Church under the fostering 
care of such ingenious theorists as Peter de Medrano and his 
brethren. 

Dicendum sit, concessum deiparse dominae prlvilegium assis- 
tendi physice et realiter in aliquibus suis simulachris seu ima- 
ginibus : — quod, in aliquibus simulachris seu imaginibus insig- 
nibus ipsius, pie credatur assistere adesseque personaliter phy- 
sice et realiter : — ut in illis debitas adorationes recipiat a fide- 
libus cultoribus. R. P. Petri de Medran. Rosetum Theolog. 
p. 311. Hispal. A. D. 1702. cited in Life of Bp. Pecock, p. 79. 

" Whereas, for some ages," says Erasmus, " it was thought 
" an abominable thing for a painted or engraven image to be 
" seen in the churches of Christians : then (namely in his own 
" time) the use of images was carried to that height, that 
' 1 it not only exceeded all bounds, but was even far from being 
" decent; since there were to be seen in churches such un- 
" seemly paintings as were in porticos and taverns. However, 
" by degrees, it came to be believed, that, in these images, 
" there was a revelation of the real presence of the saints whose 
" images they were, and that the saints assisted and were per- 
" sonally present with them physically." Erasm. Epist. lib. 



CHAP. I.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



25 



" Who ?" responds the Bishop of Strasbourg. 
" The Rector of Long-Newton." 

xxxi. epist. 47. Lond. A. D. 1642. cited in Life of Bp. Pecock, 
p. 79. 

Here we have the true rationale of the superstition, that 
well-dressed Madonnas occasionally move their eyes, and that 
wooden Bambinos make erratic excursions from their niches. 
The reader has already seen the speculative theology of that 
accomplished Spanish Jesuit Peter de Medrano : let him next, 
under the same auspices, mark its development in practice. 
Respecting the images of our Lady del Aviso and of Pity, in the 
colleges. of Lima and Callaya, he tells us : Non semel in mira- 
culosum sudorem lachrymasque resolutce sunt. But yet more 
wonderful are the exploits of the miraculous image of our Lady 
del Rosario, the patroness of Lima and all Peru, as detailed by 
this same Peter. Scepe refulsit auricomis solaribus radiis: 
atque in varios aspectus, veneratione amove et timore dignos, 
divinum vultum transmutavit. Roset. Theol. p. 311. Doubt- 
less, these tricks, in point of mere mechanism, were performed 
on the same principle, as those, which had long illustrated the 
Rood of grace at Boxley, and which were readily detected at 
the time of the Reformation by the easy process of opening the 
image : but the rationale, which caused them to be played off, 
was the diligently inculcated doctrine, ridiculed of old by Arno- 
bius, that the prototype -was physically and really present in 
the representative puppet. The doctrine and the practice of 
good Peter de Medrano tally as exactly as the two edges of a 
severed indenture. 

That the Bishop of Strasbourg may save himself the trouble 
of demonstrating in form the institution of Cross-worship by 
Christ and his Apostles, as he has already so cogently demon- 
strated that of Image-worship, I will briefly remind him, or any 
other equally adventurous theologian whom it may concern, of 
the testimony of Minucius Felix in the year 220. 

Cruces nec colimus, nec optamus. Min. Fel. Octav. p. 284. 



26 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. II. 



CHAPTER II. 

MISREPRESENTATION, INFALLIBILITY, PRESCRIPTION. 

Leaving to my opponent the hopeful project of 
demonstrating, that Christ instituted Image-wor- 
ship before he was fourteen years old, I shall 
now venture to express a hope, that, even in the 
very inferior matter of quashing my evidence on 
the negative side of the leading question which 
we litigate, the Bishop has not come off altogether 
victorious. 

In prosecuting this point, I really must decline 
minutely following his lordship through his entire 
course. If it suits him to rewrite the Discussion 
Amicale, it certainly does not suit me to indulge 
my readers, however exemplary may be their 
patience, with the Crambe recocta of my Diffi- 
culties of Romanism. By far the greater part of 
the Bishop's Answer requires no Reply. Here 
I shall certainly claim the privilege of sparing 
both my readers and myself unnecessary fatigue. 
Wherever a reply may seem necessary and may be 
useful, I shall give it. 

I. I shall begin with complaining of the system 
of gross misrepresentation, which pervades the 
whole of the Bishop's Answer. 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



27 



To go through the sickening task of replying, 
article by article, is impossible. The result of 
such an undelectable undertaking would be a dull 
and ponderous volume, which would never be 
waded through even by Perseverance personified. 
I must content myself, therefore, with requesting 
the honest inquirer to peruse my Difficulties of 
Romanism conjointly with the Discussion Ami- 
cale, following, from time to time, my perfectly 
accurate references. To expect from me more, 
than a specimen or spicilegium of the Bishop's 
exploits in this way, were cruel and unreasonable. 

1. One such specimen has already been given. 
The Bishop tells his readers, that " I have con- 

" sidered it prudent to withhold from mine " the 
ray of light which Tertullian throws upon Christ's 
very early institution of Image-worship : when, 
all the while, I have actually enlightened them 
with this identical ray in its full brilliancy, giving 
them both Tertullian's own words and my own 
painful comment to boot K 

2. Because, with our wise reformers of the An- 
glican Church, I maintain, that the Holy Scrip- 
ture contains all which is essential to salvation, 
and that no article of faith can be justly imposed 
save by the ascertained warrant of the same 
Holy Scripture; the Bishop absolutely turns 
round upon me, as differing toto ccelo from our 
own Jewel, who, for the just interpretation of 



See DifF. of Rom. p. 277, 278. 



28 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. II. 



Scripture, very rationally appealed to the testi- 
mony of the early Fathers : and he actually re- 
viles me, in good set terms, as pleading, versus 
Jewel, for all the licentious absurdities of illegiti- 
mate or insulated private judgment \ 

Why, my good lord of Strasbourg, some va- 
luable protestant friends have even blamed me 
for asserting much too strongly the precise line 
of investigation, which you would exhibit me as 
rejecting 2 . 

3. If, in quoting a passage from an ancient au- 
thor, I take what is necessary to my purpose, 
omitting the mass of superfluous or irrelative 
context antecedent and succedent : the Bishop, 
because my Work is not water-logged like his 
own with enormously long citations, labours to 
persuade his readers, that I have been guilty of 
garbling and suppression. 

If, while I scrupulously preserve the sense of 
my author, I do not always think it necessary to 
mar my Book with the barbarisms of a verbum de 
verbo translation : the Bishop forthwith raises an 
outcry, enough to frighten all his lady-readers 
out of their seven senses, respecting my interested 
unfaithfulness 3 . 

1 Answer, p. 74 — 93. 

2 See Diff. of Rom. p. 35—46. 

3 The idioms of Greek and English are so different, that an 
absolutely literal translation will sometimes even alter the sense 
of a passage. We have a curious example of this kind, in 
2 Peter ii. 5. The original Greek, 'AW oydoov Nwe hKcuoav- 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



29 



If, with perfect innocence, I happen to arrange 
several citations, from the same author, in one 
and the same paragraph : the Bishop incontinently 
sounds the alarm, that I wish dishonestly to exhi- 
bit disjoined passages as continuous ; when, all 
the while, the accurate and distinct references, 
severally attached to each passage, preclude the 
possibility of mistake even in a person who hap- 
pens to be no Grecian, provided only he can read 
those Arabic numerals, which we have naturalised 
in every European typography, and which we 
commonly employ to designate the pages of an 
author referred to \ 

vrjg KrjpvKa e^vXa^e, our translators, with all the inflexibility of 
verbal precision, have rendered, But saved Noah the eighth 
person a preacher of righteousness. Had they, not verbally 
indeed, though doubtless in point of the real sense of the origi- 
nal more accurately, rendered it, But saved Noah, a preacher 
of righteousness, with seven other persons : the Bishop, on the 
principles of the small criticism wherewith he has occasionally 
assailed myself, would have made the very welkin re-echo with 
the notorious infidelity of our English Version. Yet, though 
the Bishop can quarrel with a translation, which, while it pays 
a due regard to idiom, faithfully preserves the sense of the 
author : he can himself, when it suits his purpose, totally change 
the sense of his original, though the idiom of the ancient lan- 
guage here differs not from the idiom of either French or 
English. Witness his rendering Theodoret's Greek, Mivei yap 
£7rt Ttjg Trporepag ovarlag /ecu rov ayji^drog Kat rov eidovg, They 
remain in the shape and form of the former substance, instead 
of, They remain in the former substance and shape and form. 
But of this the reader will hear more anon. 

1 Let the reader turn to my Diff. of Rom. p. 73, 74 : and 



30 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. II. 



Such controversial devices would irretrievably 
disgrace even a much better cause, than that 
which has been espoused by the Bishop. Can 
the reader expect me laboriously to follow his 
lordship through all and several of his manifold 
doubles ? I think not. Once for all, I shall con- 
tent myself with solemnly declaring, that, in no 
one instance, have I designedly and intentionally 
garbled or perverted or misrepresented an author. 
If I have any where erred in the multiplicity of 
my quotations, let the charitable reader ascribe 
my mistake to inadvertence or to sheer igno- 
rance, whichever he pleases. Even if the Bishop 
had been a more successful critic than I am wil- 
ling to hope he lias been, I am sufficiently rich to 
feel myself not very seriously impoverished by 
one or two stray erasures. 

II. The Bishop, as in duty bound, still hankers 
after the infalhbility of his Church. 

then let him judge for himself, whether any person, who paid 
the slightest attention to my marginal references, could for a 
moment imagine, that I wished to exhibit the several extracts 
from Clement of Alexandria, as contiguous, and not disjoined, 
in the Greek original. The cited passages are four in number : 
and they are severally referred, each by its own distinct refer- 
ence, to p. 104, and p. 105, and p. 156, and p. 158, of the 
Cologne edit, of Clement. A.D. 1688. Yet the Bishop would 
fain persuade the Public, that such arrangements were fraudu- 
lently adopted : though, I believe, Lynceus himself would be 
unable to discover, what benefit I could possibly derive from 
this management. Such allegations chafe one's blood more 
perhaps than in reason they ought to do. 

12 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



31 



1. I had stated it to be somewhat odd, that the 
infallible Church had never yet decided where its 
infallibility is lodged : whence, of course, some of 
its members seek it here, and some seek it there ; 
all, I make no doubt, with equal certainty and 
equal emolument. The Bishop thinks it quite 
sufficient to reply as follows. 

ff The general acceptation of the Bishops dis- 
" persed over the world assures us, that a Coun- 
" cil is really ecumenical or universal : by them 
" also are we made certain, that the Pope has 
" pronounced ex cathedra. Thus we Catholics 1 
" agree perfectly in the same principle : and, in 
" reality, we on both sides attach the seal of iri- 
" fallibility to universal consent. This, I con- 
" ceive, is all that needs be said in reply to this 
n formidable objection 2 ." 

1 By Catholics, the Bishop means, I suppose, Latins. Such 
may, or may not, be the opinion of the members of one single 
provincial branch of the Catholic Church : but it is not the 
opinion held by the members of other branches, that even a 
really ecumenical Council (which, by the way, never existed) 
is infallible. Even on his own principles, I should be glad to 
know, how many of the Councils held under the auspices of the 
Pope were received by all the Bishops dispersed over the world. 
Did the Greek and Syrian and Armenian and Abyssinian Pre- 
lates always receive them ? The fact is, a knot of men of the 
Western Patriarchate congregate together : and, by the notable 
expedient of pronouncing all the Eastern Patriarchates schisma- 
tical, they arrogate to themselves the exclusive appellation of 
Catholics ; and thus, by making their little* packed Synods 
ecumenical, they claim for them the privilege of infallibility. 

2 Answer, p. 23, 24. 



32 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. II. 



Such, very probably may be the Bishop's own 
private opinion : but, as the infallible Church has 
never made it an article of faith, his lordship's 
gloss is no way binding upon others. Neither is 
it any answer to my difficulty. Those, who have 
contended or who do contend for the personal 
infallibility of the Pope, have quite as good a right 
to their opinion, as the Bishop of Strasbourg has 
to his : yet, if infallibility be lodged exclusively, 
where his lordship, by his own private authority, 
has been pleased to place it ; many very devout 
Latins may have been led into grievous errors 
both of doctrine and of practice by their theory of 
the personal infallibility of his holiness \ 

The Bishop will say, that these poor misguided 
creatures had nobody to thank but themselves. 

True : but what practical benefit can result 
from infallibility, when the infallible Church most 
unluckily has never yet defined, either the precise 
place where it is lodged, or the sundry simulated 
places where it is not lodged ? The Bishop, I 

1 The opinion, that the Pope independently, as well as the 
Pope conjointly with a Council, is infallible, is much more con- 
sistent than what appears to be the Bishop's speculation re- 
specting this knotty point. So far as I can understand him, 
the Church is infallible : but the Vicar of Christ, the divinely 
appointed head of the Church, is fallible. The Bishop, in 
short, seems to hold the paradox of an infallible body deco- 
rated with a fallible head. Possibly the hint of such an extra- 
ordinary compound may have been taken from the exordium of 
the Ars Poetica. 



CHAP. II.] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



33 



believe, denies the personal infallibility of the 
Pope : but, if he should please to hold it, the dif- 
ficulty will still remain in full force. Either way, 
we have nothing more than the private unsanc- 
tioned opinion of the Bishop of Strasbourg. The 
Church having decided nothing, how will he prove 
those to be in the wrong, who believe or who 
have believed the Pope to be infallible : and how, 
conversely, will he prove those to be in the right, 
who believe or who have believed the Pope to be 
fallible ? Nay, how will he prove, that infalli- 
bility is lodged with an ecumenical Council, rati- 
fied by the Pope ex cathedra, and received by all 
the Bishops dispersed over the world ? How 
does he know, that the assent of every Presbyter 
is not also necessary : how does he prove, that 
the voice of the Laity is superfluous. All, that 
he knows, is, that infalhbility certainly belongs to 
the Catholic Church, and is certainly lodged 
somewhere. But, in what precise region, to the 
exclusion of all other regions, this somewhere is 
to be sought, the Church has never determined, 
and the Bishop can have no right to give an opi- 
nion which shall be binding upon his brethren. 
Until the knotty point of specific authoritative 
definition shall have been settled, the assertion of 
the Papalists is quite as good, as the assertion of 
the Conciliarians. Either assertion rests merely 
u^on private opinion. 

Nor is even this the worst part of the business. 
As the intricate question of the somewhere never 

D 



34 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. II. 



has been authoritatively settled : so, in the very 
nature and necessity of things, it never can be 
authoritatively settled save by an immediate reve- 
lation from heaven. No decision, whether by 
Pope, or by Council, or by both united, or by 
both episcopally admitted, will be worth a rush ; 
unless we anteriorly know, that the deciders 
themselves are infallible : and this, by the very 
terms of the case, never can be anteriorly known, 
except through a revelation from heaven; be- 
cause the specific object of the decision of the 
deciders is to define infallibly the precise quarter, 
where, and where alone, infallibility is lodged. 
Truly, this same infallibility is a most marvellously 
valuable and a most preeminently useful privilege 
of the Catholic Church, when we neither do know, 
nor ever can know except by a voice from heaven, 
where it is deposited. 

2. It is, however, quite refreshing to observe, 
how the Bishop deals with one of his infallible 
Councils, the second Lateran to wit. 

I had noticed the flat contradiction of this 
theopneust Conclave to the decision of inspired 
Scripture, in giving as a reason for prohibiting 
the marriage of the Clergy, that Priests ought 
not to addict themselves to chambering and wan- 
tonness. 

All very true, says the Bishop : but fair and 
softly. This "is a reflection, not a decree 1 ." 

1 Answer, p. 44. 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



35 



The infallible Council cannot err in its decrees ; 
but it may stumble most grievously in its reflec- 
tions : and the decree itself is not a jot the worse, 
because the erroneous reflection is even avowedly, 
its basis \ You shall be King, quoth the Bishop 
to his holiness in his own second Council of La- 
teran : but then / will be viceroy over you. 

3. The Bishop is disposed to view the whole 
see-saw respecting Image-worship, which in my 
Difficulties of Romanism I have detailed at some 
length 2 , as nothing more than a mere unlucky 
family-quarrel, springing out of pure misunder- 
standing, and long since happily made up. Nay, 
even in the very midst of the squabble, he assures 
us, that those doughty litigants were quite agreed 
in the self-same doctrine ; though, unfortunately 
(as he admits), they were not aware of their per- 
fect harmony 3 . 

I freely leave to his lordship the delicate task 
of mediating in the family-quarrel : and, since he 
professes to be dissatisfied with the specimen of 
conciliar discrepancy, which I have already ad- 
duced ; it may at least be amusing, though per- 
haps superflous, if I subjoin, out of a huge mass 
which lies before me, some yet additional examples. 

1 Cum, enim, ipsi templum Dei, vasa Domini, sacrarium 
Spiritus Sancti, debeant et esse et dici ; indignum est eos cubi- 
libus et immundicitiis deservire, Concil. Lateran, secund. can. 
vi. Labb. Concil. vol. x. p. 1003. 

2 Diff. of Rom. p. 13—10. 

3 Answer, p. 39. 

D 2 



36 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. II. 



(1.) The Councils of Constance and Basil de- 
fined a general Council to be above the Pope : 
but the Council of Florence and the fifth Council 
of Lateran pronounced the Pope to be above a 
general Council \ 

This, I suppose, was another family-quarrel ; in 
which, at the bottom, the parties were all of one 
opinion. 

(2.) The sixth general Council, which sat at 
Constantinople in the year 680, decreed, that 
marriage is dissolved by heresy : but the Council 
of Trent declared, that heresy does not dissolve 
marriage 2 . 

Still, this was a mere family-quarrel : and the 
two Councils, all the while, asserted the self-same 
proposition. 

(3.) The Council of Basil was confirmed by 
Pope Nicolas V ; whence, according to the most 
approved Roman theory, it must be received by 
the faithful as infallible : but, by the fifth Council 
of Lateran, which was confirmed by Pope Leo X, 
and which at Rome is esteemed an ecumenical 
Council, it was condemned as a mere schismatical 
and seditious conventicle. 

We must, however, piously believe the whole 
to have been a mere ill-explained family-quarrel. 

1 Concil. Constan. sess. iv. v. Concil. Basil, sess. ii. Concil. 
Flor. sess. xxv. Concil. Later, quint, sess. xi. 

3 Concil. Constant, can. Ixxii. Concil. Trident, sess. xxiv. 
can. 5. 



CHAP. Il/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 37 

4. We may now profitably observe the singular 
situation of every orthodox Romanist, who, with 
implicit faith, subscribes to the Creed of Pope 
Pius IV, as constructed upon the dogmata of the 
Tridentine Council. 

" All things, delivered, defined, and declared, 
" by sacred Canons and Ecumenical Councils and 
" especially by the holy Council of Trent, I un- 
" doubtingly receive and profess : and, at the 
" same time, all things contrary thereto, and 
" whatsoever heresies have been condemned and 
" rejected and anathematised by the Church, I 
" equally condemn and reject and anathematise. 
" This true Catholic Faith, without which no man 
" can be saved, and which at present I freely pro- 
" fess and truly hold, I, the same N, do promise, 
tf vow, and swear, most constantly to retain and 
" profess, entire and inviolate, to the last gasp, 
" God helping me ; and to provide, as much as in 
" me shall lie, that it shall be held, taught, and 
" preached, by my subjects, or by those whose 
" care shall appertain to me by virtue of my office. 
" So help me God, and these holy Gospels of 
'i God V 

By the adoption of this avowal, the paradoxical 
subscriber promises to believe, as necessary to sal- 
vation, that a general Council is above the Pope, 
but yet that the Pope is above a general Council ; 

1 Profess, fid. cath. secund. Concil. Trident, ex bull. Pii 
Papse IV. apud Syllog. Confess, p. 5. Oxon. 1827. 



38 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. II. 



that marriage is dissolved by heresy, but yet that 
heresy does not dissolve marriage ; that Image- 
worship is very right, but yet that Image-worship 
is very wrong ; that an ecumenical Council ratified 
by the Pope must be received as infallible, but yet 
that the self-same ecumenical Council is a schis- 
matical and seditious conventicle. 

Mr. Butler, if I mistake not, assures us, that 
the Creed of Pope Pius IV is the Creed of every 
modern Romanist. Our brethren of the Latin 
Church have adopted it, I suppose, on the princi- 
ple of the Credo quia est impossibile. 

III. In my Difficulties of Romanism, I had 
remarked, that, for the purpose of establishing the 
truths of Christianity, the argument from Pre- 
scription was excellent in the days of Ireneus and 
Tertullian ; but that, for the purpose of establish- 
ing the peculiarities of Romanism, it was woefully 
bad in the nineteenth century \ 

Whereupon, the Bishop turns round upon me 
with a very admirable English divine at his heels, 
that he may the better put me to open shame. 

" In this manner," says Dr. Waterland as cited 
by the Bishop, " we can reason even at this day ; 
" and can thereby make Ireneus's and Tertullian's 
" argument our own, provided we have first 
" proved that the faith we contend for is the 
" very same that obtained in the Churches of 
" that age 2 ." 

1 Diff. of Rom. p. 31—35. 2 Answer, p. 73. 



CHAP. II.] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



39 



The learned Englishman's provided, contrary 
to the old adage respecting the pacific qualities of 
its synonym if, will, I fear, turn out to be no very 
energetic peace-maker for the Bishop's Creed. 
Doubtless, his lordship may make the argument 
of Ireneus and Tertullian his own, provided he 
has first proved that the faith he contends for is 
the very same that obtained in the Churches of 
that age. Nothing, I readily admit, can be more 
clear. But, hereby, hangs a tale. Has the Bishop 
proved this not trifling matter? Has he ful- 
filled the somewhat troublesome requisitions of 
Dr. Waterland's provided 9 Whenever his lord- 
ship shall have accomplished this necessary pre- 
liminary, I give him free leave to turn against me 
the cannon of my own camp. Dr. Waterland, I 
allow, is at the least a two-and-forty pounder : 
but, for the present, to keep the Bishop as well as 
myself out of harm's way, I shall take the liberty 
of spiking him. If once I really stray from my 
position, a shot from such a formidable piece of ar- 
tillery may doubtless make quick work with me : 
but'the mere recoil of the machine, when managed 
by unskilful hands, may haply lay the Bishop 
prostrate. We had better let the doctor alone. 

" The Church," says Ireneus, " though scat- 
& tered through the whole world to the ends of 
" the earth, has received her faith from the Apos- 
" ties and their disciples V 



1 Iren. adv. haer. lib. i. c. 2. p. 34. A.D. 1570. 



40 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. IT. 



Undoubtedly : but what faith ? Faith in Tran- 
substantiation, and Purgatory, and Image-worship 
and Saint-worship, and Cross-worship, and Relic- 
worship ? Nothing of the sort. The faith, which, 
according to the amply sufficient testimony of 
Ireneus, she received from the Apostles and inva- 
riably professed in all her scattered provincial 
branches, was the very same (for he details it at 
large in the form of the most ancient Symbol ex- 
tant), as that which is expressed in the Creed 
familiarly denominated the Apostles' Creed \ 
Not a word does he say of any transmission of 
those Latin peculiarities, which have all gradually 
accumulated to their present portentous magni- 
tude since the days of Ireneus. In our age, as 
well as in his age (according to the most just re- 
mark of Dr. Waterland, so whimsically misunder- 
stood by the Bishop), his argument will equally 
apply to the doctrines, propounded as apostolical, 

1 Iren. adv. hser. lib. i. c. 2. p. 34, 36. See also the same 
Symbol in substance, in lib. iii. c. iv. § 2. p. 162. The two 
strictly parallel Creeds, vouched for by Tertullian as setting 
forth the universal and unvarying faith of the Church in his day, 
will be found, in Tertull. de prescript, adv. hagr. Oper. p. 1 00, 
and in Tertull. adv. Prax. § i. Oper. p. 405. Whenever the 
Bishop can find any of his cherished peculiarities in the Symbols 
preserved by Ireneus and Tertullian, which they vouch for as 
then notoriously containing the universally received doctrine 
taught by the Apostles ; he shall have my free consent to use 
their argument from prescription in favour of such peculiarities : 
a point, on which I dare say good Dr. Waterland and myself 
will have no family-quarrel. 



CHAP. Il/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



41 



in the venerable Symbol which he has preserved : 
but it will not therefore apply, as I ventured to 
assure his lordship, to the additional Latin spe- 
culations and practices of the nineteenth century. 
The Symbol of Ireneus, for which alone he 
vouches, and which perfectly corresponds with 
the two ancient parallel Symbols preserved by 
Tertullian, is not decorated (the Bishop will have 
the goodness to observe) with a modern tail-piece 
of thirteen supplemental articles ; like the unfor- 
tunate but admirable Creed of the first Nicene 
Council, which, ever since the time of Pope Pius 
IV, has, among the Latins, been compelled to 
enact the masquerader : but, on the contrary, it 
sets forth those doctrines, which were really 
taught and handed down by the Apostles. For 
the thirteen articles of the tail-piece, Ireneus and 
Tertullian beg leave to decline vouching. They 
are the exclusive property of the Bishop and his 
friends. Their very collocation shews their 
novelty. 

The Bishop, in his Answer, declares, that he 
commences his research with the fifth century, 
and that thence he gradually mounts until he 
triumphantly enters (the words are his own) the 
second century where he at length reposes with 
myself at the fountain of pure and apostolic doc- 
trine \ 

This triumphant progress of the worthy Prelate 



1 Answer, p. 72, 73. 



42 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



£chap. m 



I have never been able to discover in the Discus- 
sion Amicale : and he gives me no paginal refer- 
ence to it in his Answer, Hence I can only re- 
quest him to favour me with a proof, of the often 
enumerated peculiarities of the Latin Church, 
from Ireneus and Athenagoras and Justin and 
Polycarp and Ignatius (if we admit his shorter 
epistles to be genuine) and Clement of Rome. I 
myself have diligently perused all those writers 
from beginning to end: but I did not chance to 
note any traces of the peculiarities patronised by 
the Bishop of Strasbourg \ 

It may not be improper to remark, that all 
these often enumerated peculiarities, with the 
single, exception of Cross-worship, are all nomi- 

1 I beg to qualify my perhaps too large remark. In Ireneus, 
there certainly are traces of the transubstantiation of the eucha- 
ristic wine into actual blood, even before that doctrine was 
started by the Eutychians in the fifth century as an argumentum 
ad hominem against the misrepresented Catholics. But, un- 
luckily, this first-recorded change of the consecrated wine was 
a profane juggling trick of one Marcus, a worthless Gnostic 
heretic. Here was a fine opportunity for Ireneus, while cen- 
suring the impiety of the miscreant, to have set forth the true 
old orthodox tenet of Transubstantiation, as handed down from 
the Apostles : but, most provokingly, not a word does he say on 
the subject. Doubtless the reason was, that he scrupled to 
commit to paper the Bishop's grand secret of the Mysteries. 
He contents himself with merely calling this Marcus a very 
dexterous juggler : magicoe imposturse peritissimus. See a full 
account of this curious matter in Iren. adv. hser. lib. i. c. 8, 9. 
p. 43—48. 



CHAP. IlJ DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



43 



natim and speciatim propounded in the thirteen 
supplemental articles, wherewith Pope Pius has 
bedizened the poor old Nicene Creed. Hence, in 
maintaining them, the Bishop is strictly correct 
upon the most approved Latin model. 



44 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



CHAPTER III. 

TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 

The Bishop of Strasbourg, very naturally and 
very properly, musters all his forces in order to a 
full trial of strength with the Rector of Long- 
Newton on the important question of Transub- 
stantiation : and the Rector, even in the judgment 
of some highly-valued friends, having, in the 
height of his romantic honesty, needlessly thrown 
away a weapon once wielded by Tillotson, the 
Bishop's hopes of a victory are proportionably 
more sanguine l . Now the Rector, having some- 

1 See my Diff. of Rom. p. 55, 56. The argument in ques- 
tion, as stated by Tillotson, and as drawn out at considerable 
length by Bennet, is this. 

Transubstantiation contradicts the senses. But, if we can- 
not trust our senses in the matter of Transubstantiation : then 
neither can we trust our eyes or our ears, when they are em- 
ployed as vehicles to convey to us the truth of the doctrine. 
Therefore, the truth of the doctrine, from the very nature of the 
doctrine itself, is incapable of demonstration. 

The fallacy of this very ingenious sophism, which once 
pleased me much, consists in the not distinguishing, between 
the direct demonstration of the naked truth of the doctrine, 
and the abstractedly possible proof of the existence of the 
doctrine at a particular time and under particular circum- 
stances. 

It will not be denied, that the existence of the doctrine in 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



45 



what of the noun-substantive in his composition, 
still abides by his former estimate of the Primate's 

the modern Church of Rome, be the doctrine itself true or be it 
false, may be demonstrated by sufficient historical testimony. 

Neither will it be denied, that sufficient historical testimony, 
if such testimony could be produced, would demonstrate the 
fact of its existence, be the doctrine itself true or be it false, 
in the primitive Church, during the age of the Apostles and 
with their express sanction and approval. 

Let us suppose, then, that the Bishop of Strasbourg had ful- 
filled his promise, and had demonstrated its existence at that 
time and under those circumstances ; a matter, to which in it- 
self no abstract impossibility attaches : what, in that case, would 
have become of the argument of Tillotson and Bennet ? Clearly, 
we must either have admitted the truth of the doctrine, or have 
denied the truth of Christianity. 

Under such circumstances, notwithstanding the Bishop's dis- 
covery that I have served an apprenticeship in the school of 
Voltaire, I should have reasoned thus. 

The truth of Christianity is incontrovertibly established by 
overwhelmingly sufficient testimony. Christianity, therefore, I 
must believe. But the fact, that the doctrine of Transubstan- 
tiation existed in the very earliest Church through the in- 
spired teaching of the Apostles is also established by invincible 
historical testimony. Therefore, from the fact of its existence 
under such peculiar circumstances, I am compelled to infer and 
to admit its truth. 

For my own part, I scruple not to say, that, if the Bishop of 
Strasbourg could have established the fact of existence 
agreeably to bis pledge and promise, I would have admitted the 
fact of truth as an inevitable consequence. At least, I see 
not how the consequence could be avoided, save by a denial of 
the truth of Christianity. In a word, to a person who receives 
the Gospel as an infallible communication from heaven, there is 
no abstract impossibility of demonstrating the truth of the 



46 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



argument. Hence, though without any very- 
serious anxiety, he is constrained to meet the 

doctrine of Transubstantiation through the medium of its an- 
teriorly demonstrated existence at a particular time and 
under particular circumstances. 

But, while I thus without reserve state my conviction that 
Abp. Tillotson's famous argument is inconclusive, let it be re- 
collected, that the mere vulgar bullying tone, with which some 
Latin advocates claim to have settled the point of history before 
us, is no proof that they have really effected their purpose. 
Such premature self-arrogations of victory, some traces of which 
may be detected in the Bishop's Answer, as they will work no 
conviction in the mind of a sober inquirer, so they will only 
serve to call up a smile on his countenance. The Bishop ought 
to have left the plebeian shout of unconfirmed triumph to the 
underbred retainers of his Church. With them it is perfectly in 
character : from him I had once anticipated better things. 

Mr. Garbett, in a very valuable and powerful Work recently 
published by him under the title of The Nullity of the Roman 
Faith, has, like those talented friends to whom I allude in the 
text, politely half censured me for surrendering what has often 
been deemed a very strong bastion of our common fortress. See 
Nullit. p. 52 — 60. The above is my vindication. 

A much more formidable argument against Transubstantia- 
tion may be deduced from its virtual assertion, that the same 
material body may be in many different places at the same time. 
But I like not this mode of reasoning against doctrines. In my 
judgment, it savours too much of the presumptuous impiety of 
the Socinian School. 

To shew that I am not quite singular in my views, I must be 
permitted to say, that, in my very able friend the Rev d . L. V. 
Vernon of Stokesley, who took a part in our amicable private 
controversy, I found a most powerful supporter of the opinion, 
which, after much thought and examination, I have been in- 
duced to espouse. 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 47 

Bishop upon his lordship's own selected ground of 
historical testimony. 

I. In his Answer to me, the Bishop repeats, at 
full length, all that he had said in the Discussion 
Amicale relative to the alleged circumstance, that 
the doctrine of Transuhstantiation was the secret 
of the ancient Christian Mysteries so far as they 
respected the nature of the Eucharist. 

This wild notion, for which there is not a sha- 
dow of legitimate evidence, but which rests alto- 
gether upon his lordship's own forced interpreta- 
tions and arbitrary conjectures, the Bishop em- 
ploys in a manner truly characteristic. 

If we challenge him to produce any thing like 
a distinct proof of the existence of the doctrine of 
Transuhstantiation, from the two Clements, or 
Polycarp, or Justin, or Athenagoras, or Ireneus, 
or Tertullian, who variously flourished in the first 
and second centuries : his reply (notwithstanding 
that Justin Martyr, in his first Apology, openly 
states the doctrine of the Trinity, which the 
Bishop himself now allows to be a secret of the 
Mysteries, and which in truth is the secret) is, 
that no such proof can be reasonably expected ; 
because the doctrine was handed down by oral 
tradition only, and was kept a profound secret 
from all but the initiated l . 

1 Athenagoras, like Justin, makes no scruple of declaring, in 
his Apology also, the grand and preeminent secret of the Mys- 
teries, the doctrine of the Trinity. The truth is, the Mysteries 
12 



48 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. III. 



If, on the other hand, we adduce language 
plainly incompatible with the doctrine, and if we 

were more a matter of catechetical discipline, than the vehicles 
of any secret properly so called. Why the secret of Transub- 
stantiation was never, like the secret of the Trinity, openly de- 
clared in any of the ancient Apologies, is easily accounted for. 
The doctrine of the Trinity existed in the early Church from the 
very beginning : the doctrine of Transubstantiation existed not. 
Let the Bishop, on any other ground, account for the fact, that 
the ancient ecclesiastics scrupled not, when the good of the 
Church required it, to declare openly, even to pagan Emperors' 
what, by the testimony of Jerome and Cyril of Jerusalem, was 
that palmary and preeminent secret of the Mysteries which in- 
cluded (as it were) within itself all the minor and subordinate 
secrets : and yet that these same ecclesiastics should never once 
reveal the secret of Transubstantiation, if they ever possessed 
such a secret, when the perpetual allegations of child-murder 
and cannibalism so imperiously required them to explain what 
the Bishop assures us was their doctrine of the Eucharist. Why 
should they be so very scrupulous of declaring to the Pagans the 
minor secret of Transubstantiation, when they hesitated not to 
declare the greater secret of the Trinity ? What possible evil 
could have resulted from it ? 

The Bishop will say, that the awful transmutation would have 
been profanely ridiculed by the Pagans. 

True : but is the ridicule of the Trinity less shocking to a 
pious and well-regulated mind, than the ridicule of Transub- 
stantiation ? We all know, how the doctrine of the Trinity is 
ridiculed in the Philopatris under the precise aspect of the 
special and peculiar secret of the Christian Mysteries. Why 
does not the buffoon equally ridicule the doctrine of Transub- 
stantiation 1 

Because, as the Bishop will assure us, it was too sacred to 
have been ever communicated to him. 

Is, then, the doctrine of the Trinity less sacred, than the doc- 



CHAP* III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



49 



note the absolute impossibility of any man out 
of Bedlam pronouncing that a thing may be a 
type or symbol or image or representation of its 
own proper self: then his lordship, with the 
most imposing gravity tells us, that " the Fathers, 
" not being allowed to express themselves clearly, 
" considered the eucharistic bread and wine in 
" their relation to the senses, and denominated 
" them types, emblems, images, allegories, 
"figures, and sacraments, without adding that 
" these visible appearances covered the body and 
" blood of Jesus Christ ; which would have been 
" at once discovering and betraying the secret V 
To argue, on any intelligible principles of his- 
torical testimony, with a gentleman who can take 

trine of Transubstantiation ? Would the early Christians un- 
scrupulously expose the one to ridicule ; and yet, with an almost 
morbid jealousy, guard the other from the attacks of ribald 
buffoonery ? Such conduct, which is inevitably brought out by 
the Bishop's hypothesis, baffles all rational explanation. 

Doubtless, on the principles of historical testimony, as the 
ridicule of the Trinity by the 'author of the Philopatris dis- 
tinctly proves it to have been the secret of the Christian Mys- 
teries ; so his total silence respecting Transubstantiation clearly 
enough shews, that no such secret then existed : and this con- 
clusion is invincibly established by the similar total silence of 
Julian throughout the whole of that large body of his Works 
which has come down to us ; for, had the secret existed, the 
baptised Julian must have known it; and, had he known it, we 
may be quite sure that he would not have spared it. Of this, 
more hereafter. 

1 Answer, p. 263. 



50 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



up such an extraordinary mode of demonstration, 
exceeds my limited capacity. Turning, then, in 
utter hopelessness, from the Bishop of Strasbourg, 
I shall rather consider myself as discussing the 
present part of the question before a well-educated 
assemblage of English Laymen. 

That the doctrine of Transubstantiation was 
neither the secret nor a secret of the Mysteries, 
is invincibly demonstrated even by the single 
volume of the Catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem. 

In his proem, the diligent Father distinctly 
states, that he is about to communicate to the Il- 
luminated the whole secret of the Mysteries. The 
nature of those Mysteries, therefore, and the se- 
cret which they professed to conceal from the un- 
initiated, we shall obviously learn by the mere 
mechanical act of perusing the two series of the 
Catecheses. Now this mechanical act I myself 
have performed : for I have read the entire 
Work of Cyril from beginning to end. Hence, 
from the evidence of my own eye-sight, I can 
vouch, that, so far from Transubstantiation being 
either the secret or a secret of the Mysteries, that 
secret was the palmary doctrine of the Trinity, 
viewed as comprehending or subincluding the 
whole circle of those peculiar doctrines of Christi- 
anity which are briefly propounded in the Creed 
or Symbol. Accordingly, as I have most abun- 
dantly shewn already, and as (if necessary) I 
could easily shew with yet more overwhelming 
copiousness, the special secret of the Mysteries, 
12 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



51 



or what the Bishop in his own tongue would call 
le secret par excellence, was the recondite dogma, 
ridiculed under this precise aspect by the buffoon 
in the Philopatris, that the one Jehovah incom- 
prehensibly exists in three persons. The dogma 
in question may excite the mockery of a socinian 
sciolist in the present day, just as of old it excited 
the mockery of the pagan buffoon in the Philo- 
patris. But this is nothing to my present pur- 
pose. Merely as a perfectly well established his- 
torical/act, we know, on direct positive testimony, 
that the secret of the Christian Mysteries, when 
briefly expressed (as it is expressed by Jerome, 
and by Virmilian in Cyprian, and in one already 
cited place by Cyril himself), was the doctrine of 
the holy and undivided Trinity. 

The Bishop, however, will say (as, in fact, he 
now does say, with no small measure of bitterness 
and wrath), that he never denied the doctrine of 
the Trinity to be an eminent secret of the Mys- 
teries ; though, in his zeal for Transubstantiation, 
he took special good care never to mention the cir- 
cumstance : and he will add, that, if Transubstanti- 
ation be not the exclusive secret (as, I will venture 
to say, any person, who reads the Discussion 
Amicale, would suppose, like myself, that such was 
his original opinion), yet, at all events, it was a 
very eminent secret of the ancient Christian Mys- 
teries K 

1 The worthy Bishop (heaven bless the mark !) shrewdly sus- 
pects, that I was but little acquainted with the old Mysteries, 

E 2 



52 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. in. 



Where is his proof from that professed mys- 
tagogue Cyril of Jerusalem? The catechistical 
hierophant expressly declares, that he is about 
to reveal the secret or secrets (if the Bishop pre- 
fer the plural form) of the Christian Mysteries. 
Here, therefore, if any where, we must expect a 
distinct and luminous exposition of the doctrine 
of Transubstantiation, harmoniously correspond- 
ing, to the unspeakable edification of every ortho- 
dox Latin, with the subsequent equally distinct 
and luminous expositions of the Quarto-Lateran 
and Tridentine Councils. 

Now where is this desideratum ? Where is 
Cyril's revealment of the secret of Transubstan- 
tiation ? Where is that distinct and precise state- 
ment, which made his Competentes as much at 
home in the doctrine as the Bishop of Strasbourg 
himself ? I read it not in the bond. About this 
same volatile secret of Transubstantiation, in the 
form of a regular doctrinal statement, not a sylla- 
ble is there, in the whole volume of the Cate- 
cheses, from beginning to end. The secret may 
have existed in the old Mysteries : but, if it did, 
Cyril takes special good care, so far as this arca- 
num is concerned, to leave his symmystce (as an- 
cient Ignatius speaks) not a jot more wise than he 
found them. 

until 1 had had the advantage of reading the Discussion Ami- 
cole. See Answer, p. 346, 347. This little ebullition of Gal- 
liean vanity I can freely pardon. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



53 



In making these assertions, I have been per- 
fectly aware of the existence of the fourth mys- 
tagogical Catechesis, in which Cyril professedly 
treats of the doctrine of the Eucharist : and,, ac- 
cordingly, that all might be fair and open, I myself 
cited from it the very strongest passage I could 
find, which might seem to favour the doctrine of 
Transubstantiation ; and I then shewed, at some 
length, its utter insufficiency for any such pur- 
pose K Whereupon the Bishop, simply because I 
did not also cite another much less strong passage 
from the same Catechesis, violently reviles me, 
on the ground that I have been guilty of dishonest 
and intentional suppression 2 . In the mean time, 
what is the conduct of this upright castigator him- 
self ? While, with vast parade, he cites the weaker 
passage, which, in a Work studious of brevity, I 
had thought it superfluous to cite : he prudently 
suppresses the greatest part of the explanatory 
context of that passage, which, if quoted at full 
length, would have effectually nullified the sense 
that he would fain have his readers put upon it. 

Such being the state of the case between my 
antagonist and myself, in order that all suspicion 
of foul dealing on my part may be effectually re- 
moved, I shall now give the entire Catechesis : 
and I admonish the reader, that it contains, both 
the sronger passage originally quoted by myself, 

1 See my Diff. of Rom. p. 67, 68. 

3 Answer, p. 239—241. 



54 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. MB 



the weaker passage which the Bishop reviles me 
for not having also quoted, and the context which 
(in citing the passage not cited by myself) he has 
thought fit mainly to suppress. 

" This doctrine of the blessed Paul is sufficient 
" to give you full information respecting the holy 
" mysteries : of which being deemed worthy, you 
" become partakers of the body and blood of 
" Christ. For he teaches us, that, In the night, 
" wherein ijour Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed, 
" having taken bread and having given thanks, 
" he brake and gave to his disciples, saying : 
" Take, eat ; this is my body. And, having taken 
" the cup and having given thanks, he said: Take, 
" drink; this is my blood. He himself, therefore, 
" having declared and said concerning the bread, 
a This is my body ; who shall hereafter dare to 
" doubt ? And, he himself having asserted and 
" pronounced, This is my blood; who shall hesi- 
" tate, saying that it is not his blood ? He once 
" changed the water into wine, at Cana of Galilee, 
" by his own nod : and is he not worthy of credit, 
" that he changed the wine into blood ? If, when 
" called to a mere corporeal marriage, he wrought 
" that great wonder : shall we not much rather 
" confess, that he hath given the fruition of his 
" own body and blood to the sons of the bride- 
" groom 1 ? So that, with all full assurance, let 

1 Here ended my quotation in the Difficulties of Romanism. 
See Diff. of Rom. p. 67, 68. I purposely selected the passage, 



CHAP. III. ^ DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



55 



ff us partake as of the body and blood of Christ. 
" For, under the type of bread, the body is 

as being, at least in my own apprehension, the very strongest 
in the whole Catechesis : for it not only employs the precise 
question, which would be natural in the mouth of a professed 
transubstantialist; but it likewise seems to compare the changing 
of the water into wine at Cana with the changing of the wine 
into blood in the Eucharist ; a comparison, which, if actually 
instituted, would doubtless have involved, as a necessary conse- 
quence, the homogeneity of the two changes. 

Though the Bishop, after his wont, reviles me for not having 
also cited a much iveaker passage ; he is fully sensible of the 
great apparent strength of that, which (as / thought, very ho- 
nestly) T did cite : and, accordingly, he would avail himself of 
it, though after his own very peculiar and original fashion. 

Cyril had said : " Christ having asserted, This is my blood ; 
" who shall doubt, asserting that it is not his blood V' 

Whereupon the Bishop triumphantly interposes : " Who ? 
" Mr. Faber would reply to St. Cyril ; / shall doubt it." 
Answ. p. 239. 

Now, with all due deference, what can be more miserable 
than this egregious trifling : which, nevertheless (from its logical 
conclusiveness, I suppose), so mightily pleases his lordship, that 
he resorts more than once to the same sort of interrogatory 
phraseology ? Does it follow, that I doubt the truth of Christ's 
declaration, because I more than doubt the truth of the Bishop's 
gloss upon it ? Are Christ's declaration and the Bishop's gloss 
identical ; so that a denial of the latter inevitably implies a 
denial of the former ? I can assure the Bishop, though he 
charges me with affecting the esprit fort, that I have not the 
slightest doubt respecting the truth of Christ's declaration : 
but, before I can annex any precise or definite idea to it, I must 
obviously ascertain its precise or definite meaning ; otherwise, 
Christ may declare one thing, and I may believe quite another 
thing. My humble and honest attempt to understand my 



56 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. III. 



" GIVEN YO THEE ; AND, UNDER THE TYPE OF WINE, 

" the blood is given to thee : in order that, by 
" partaking of the body and blood of Christ, thou 
" mayest become of joint body and of joint blood 
" with him. For thus also we become bearers of 
" Christ, his body and his blood being commu- 
" nicated to our members : thus, according to the 
" blessed Peter, we become partakers of the di- 
" vine nature, Christ, once conversing with the 
" Jews, said : Except ye eat my flesh and drink 
" my blood, ye have not life in yourselves. They, 

" NOT HAVING SPIRITUALLY UNDERSTOOD THE THINGS 

" which were spoken, being scandalised, went 

" back, FANCYING THAT HE EXHORTS THEM TO FLESH- 

f eating \ There were, even in the old covenant, 
" loaves of the shew-bread : but they, being of 
" the old covenant, received their end. But, in 
" the new covenant, heavenly bread and the cup 
" of salvation sanctify the soul and body. As 
" bread corresponds to the body, thus also the 
" word is fitting to the soul. Attend not then 

H TO THE BREAD AND WINE, AS IF THEY WERE MERE a 
" BREAD AND WINE : FOR THEY ARE THE BODY AND 
" BLOOD OF CHRIST, ACCORDING TO THE LORD'S DE- 

" claration. If sense suggests any thing to thee, 
" let faith confirm thee. Judge not of the mat- 
" ter from taste, but undoubtingly from the full 

Lord is, I venture to think, not perfectly identical with in- 
fidelity. 

1 Gr. POfxi^ovTeg otl etti aaptcotyayiav abrovg TrpoTp£7T£Tat. 
3 Gr. log \pi\o~iQ. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



57 



Jf assurance of faith, having been deemed worthy 
? of the body and blood of Christ. Holy David 
" also explains this efficacy to thee, saying : Thou 
" hast prepared a table before me, against those 
" who trouble me. But, what he says, is this. 
" Before thy advent, demons prepared a table for 
" men, polluted and defiled and full of diabolical 
" efficacy : but, after thy advent, O Lord, thou 
" hast prepared a table before me. When the 
" man says to God, Thou hast prepared a table 
" before me ; what means he else than the mys- 

" TICAL AND INTELLECTUAL TABLE WHICH GOD HATH 

" prepared before us, instead of that which in 
" opposition was prepared by demons ? And with 
" good reason : for the one had the communion of 
" demons ; but the other, the communion of God. 
" Thou hast made my head to shine with oil, 
" He hath made thy head to shine with oil upon 
" thy forehead, through the seal of God which 
" thou hast, that thou may est become the im- 
*' pression of the seal, the sanctification of God. 
f And thy cup maketh me drunken, as the most 
"potent. Thou seest here the cup mentioned, 
" which Jesus took in his hands : and, when he 
" had given thanks, he said ; This is my blood, 
" which is shed for many for the remission of 
" sins. On this account also, Solomon, enigma- 
" tising this grace, says, in the book of Eccle- 
" siastes ; Come, eat thy bread in cheerfulness, 
" namely the spiritual bread : and come (he calls 
" with a saving and beatifying vocation) drink 



58 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



" thy ivine in a good heart, namely the spiritual 
" wine. And let oil be poured out upon thy head. 
" Thou seest him also alluding to the mystic 
" chrism. And let thy garments be always white, 
" because the Lord hath pleasure in thy deeds. 
" For, before thou drewest nigh unto grace, thy 
" deeds were vanity of vanities ; but, having put 
" off the ancient garments, and having put on spi- 
" ritual white robes, thou oughtest always to appear 
" white in thy habiliments. We say not this in- 
" deed, that it is necessary for thee to be always 
" clad in literal white raiment : but this we say, 
" that thou must be clothed in the truly white 
" and shining and spiritual garments ; in order that 
" thou mayest say, according to the blessed Isaiah, 
" Let my soul rejoice in the Lord, for he hath 
" clothed me with the garment of salvation, and 
" he has encompassed me with the robe of joyful- 
" ness : having learned and being fully assured of 
" these things, that the apparent bread is not^ 
" bread, though sensible to the taste, but the body 
" of Christ ; and that the apparent wine is not 
" wine, though the taste intimates this, but the 
" blood of Christ ; and that, concerning this, Da- 
" vid spake long since, when he said in the psalm, 
" Bread also strengtheneth the heart of man, to 
" make him of a joyful countenance ivith oil. 
" Strengthen, then, thy heart, partaking of this 
" bread as spiritual i and make joyful the coun- 
" tenance of thy soul. Which mayest thou have 
a revealed in a pure conscience, to behold as in a 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



59 



" glass the glory of the Lord, and to work from 
" glory to glory, in Christ Jesus our Lord ! To 
" whom be honour and strength and glory for 
" ever and ever. Amen 1 ." 

1 Cyril. Catech. Mystag. iv. p. 236 — 239. Happening acci- 
dentally to look into my Difficulties of Romanism after I had sent 
to the press the MS. of the present sheets, I find, what from other 
avocations I had entirely forgotten, that I had actually quoted 
in that Work the only important member of the Bishop's ad- 
ditional citation from Cyril, which he charges me with having 
had " the effrontery to suppress," 

The passage, as cited in my DifF. of Romanism, runs verba- 
tim as follows. 

" The bread, which we behold, though to the taste it be 
" bread, is yet not bread, but the body of Christ : and the wine, 
" which we behold, though to the taste it be wine, is yet not 
" wine, but the blood of Christ." Cyril. Catech. Myst. iv. p, 
238, 239. 

This precise passage, the curious reader will find cited, in 
express connection with CyriVs pretended revelation of the 
Bishop's imaginary secret of Transubstantiation, at p. 114 of 
my Diff. of Romanism. Its supposed importance the Bishop 
indicates by printing it, as cited by himself, in distinguishing 
and emphatic Italics. See Answer, p. 241. In the appended 
note he remarks, that / have had the effrontery to suppress it, 
that he blushes to record so unworthy an artifice, and that / 
have thus wilfully concealed the truth from the sight of my 
countrymen. See Answer, p. 240. Note. 

The passage itself I deem of so little importance, that I had 
absolutely forgotten my recitation of it : I rejoice, that, by pure 
accident, I have found that I did cite it. To whom the effron- 
tery of suppression, the blush at an unworthy artifice, and the 
wilful concealment of the truth for the purpose of misleading 
the reader, most properly appertain ; whether to the strictly ho- 
nest Bishop of Strasbourg, or to the systematically dishonest 



60 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



£cHAP. III. 



If the doctrine of Transubstantiation be any 
where revealed by Cyril as the secret of the Eu- 
charist, it is revealed in the Catechesis which now 
at full length has been presented to the reader. 
The Bishop evidently claims to find it in this lec- 
ture : but, for my own part, I can no more disco- 
ver it there, than (as we shall presently learn) the 
Competentes themselves ever could 1 * 

1. With respect to the doctrine of Transubstan- 
tiation itself, we have a full and distinct statement 
of it, built very accurately upon the joint succes- 

Rector of Long-Newton : the cautious Public must judge for 
themselves. 

"I am at a loss for expressions," says the virtuous and indig- 
nant Prelate, " which, without incurring impoliteness, might 

inflict well-merited correction on this shameful want of good 
" faith. I defy any one, and, above all, the champion of figure 
" and moral change, to express Transubstantiation more clearly 
" than St. Cyril does, in the words Mr. Faber has so artfully 
" suppressed." Answer, p. 240. 

With the Bishop's politeness or want of politeness I have no 
special concern ; and, as for the passage expressing Transub- 
stantiation, it does no such thing. Be all this, however, as it 
may : let the Bishop be incontestably the best-bred man that 
France ever produced, and let Cyril (in despite of himself) 
preach Transubstantiation ; still, the passage in the Bishop's 
Italics, which I am described as having artfully suppressed, I 
have actually adduced. "Verily, some men are born impudent ; 
others achieve impudence ; and others have impudence thrust 
upon them ! Under which of the three classes the Bishop in- 
cludes myself y I pretend not to determine. This thing only is 
certain, that my effrontery is notorious : for so the Bishop as- 
sures my much abused readers. 

1 See below, chap. iii. § n. 



CHAP. II!.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



61 



sive decisions of the Quarto-Lateran and the Tri- 
dentine Councils, in the Symbol of Pope Pius IV : 
which Symbol, by that branch of the Catholics 
who are members of the provincial Church of the 
Latin Patriarchate, is, I believe, universally recog- 
nised and received. 

<e I equally profess, that, in the Mass, there is 
" offered up unto God a true, proper, and propi- 
" tiatory, sacrifice, for the quick and the dead : 
" and that, in the most holy sacrament of the 
" Eucharist, there is, truly, really, and substan- 
" tially, the body and the blood, together with 
" the soul and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus 

Christ : and that there is made a conversion, of 
" the whole substance of the bread into the body, 
" and of the whole substance of the wine into the 
" blood ; which conversion the Catholic Church 
" calls Transubstantiation 1 " 

Now what is there in the Catechesis of Cyril, 
which bears any resemblance to this distinct and 
precise and unambiguous statement ? Where are 
the Mystce taught, as the grand secret of the Eu- 
charist, that, in the Mass, a true, proper, and pro- 
pitiatory, sacrifice, for the quick and the dead, is 
offered up to God : that, in the sacrament of the 
altar, the body and blood and soul and divinity of 
Christ are present, truly, really, and substan- 
tially : and that a conversion of the whole sub- 

1 Profess. Vid. Cathol. sec. Concil. Trid. ex bull. Pii Pap. 
IV. in Eclog. Confess, p. 4. 



62 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[chap. III. 



stance of the bread into the body, and of the 
whole substance of the wine into the blood, of 
Christ, is effected by virtue of the prayer of con- 
secration ? Assuredly, if the Competentes learned 
any such doctrines from the Catechesis of Cyril, 
they must, in their acquirements, have far out- 
stripped their Catechist. 

2. But the Bishop will say, that, according to 
Cyril, the apparent bread is not bread, but the 
body of Christ ; and that the apparent wine is not 
wine, but the blood of Christ : which is a virtual 
statement of the doctrine, though not so precise, 
as that of Pope Pius. 

Now, even if we were to admit this to be, in 
some sort, the case : still, what does Cyril say, 
about the soul and the divinity of Christ being 
present, with his flesh and blood, in the conse- 
crated and Transubstantiated Elements ? Re- 
specting, both this very important part of the 
secret, and the true propitiatory sacrifice for the 
quick and the dead of him whom St. Paul and St. 
Peter concur in declaring to have been offered 
only once ; Cyril says not a single syllable in our 
Catechesis. But, in truth, it is easy to build a 
goodly superstructure upon a single passage, 
when detached (as in the Bishop's citation of it) 
from its context, and when gratuitously explained 
so as to suit the emergencies of the Latin Faith. 

The apparent bread is not bread. How is it 
not bread in the estimate of Cyril ? He himself 
will tell us in that part of the context, which the 



CHAP. III. 3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 63 

Bishop has fortunately permitted to appear even 
in his garbled quotation. Attend not to the 
bread and wine, as if they ivere mere bread and 
wine. The Bishop renders the original Greek, 
common bread and wine : and I quarrel not with 
his translation, though my own is more scrupu- 
lously exact L In this place, Cyril uses a different 
word from that employed by his remote prede- 
cessor Justin : but the idea, conveyed by it, is at 
least nearly allied to that expressed by the older 
Father, when he states, as Ireneus stated after 
him, that we receive not the Elements, as common 
bread and as common wine 2 . Now, if we receive 
them not as common bread and wine, and if we 
are forbidden to attend to them as mere bread 
and wine : the very necessity of the language im- 
ports, that they still remain real bread and wine ; 
though the bread and* wine, by consecration, have 
ceased to be mere and common. The Elements, 
in point of physical substance or composition, 
are still what they previously were : for, as Pope 
Gelasius well speaks, the substance or nature of 

1 The Greek word is \pi\o~ig. 

2 Ou yap, wg Koivbv dprov ovce kolvov nopa, ravra \afxj3d- 
vofjiep. Just. Apol. i. Oper. p. 76. The oh kolvov aprov of 
Justin is the non communis panis of Ireneus. Iren. adv. hser. 
lib. iv. c. 34. p. 264. In point of ideality, I apprehend, they 
are not quite the same as the xpiXo'iQ of Cyril. The common 
bread is unconsecrated or secular bread : the mere bread is the 
bread without (what Ephrem calls) the spiritual grace attached 
or superadded to it. 



64 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



the bread and wine ceases not to exist. But, by 
consecration, they acquire a new and venerable 
character : for, as Ephrem of Antioch justly re- 
marks, though they depart not from their own 
sensible substance, they are united, by virtue of 
consecration, to a spiritual grace. Under this as- 
pect, as Cyril very truly states, they are not bread 
and wine ; that is to say, as he explains himself 
in the context, they are not to be considered as 
mere bread and wine 1 but they are the body 
and blood of Christ ; that is to say, as he again 
explains himself in the context, they are the body 
and blood of Christ spiritually 2 . 

Such, if I mistake not, is the exact doctrine of 
the Church of England. The Elements, when 
consecrated, cease to be what Cyril and Justin 
severally call mere bread and wine and common 
bread and wine : and henceforth, as our Lord 
himself states, they become, by virtue of the 
added spiritual grace, his own body and blood. 
" Terrestrial bread," says the venerable Ireneus, 
" experiencing the call of God, is no longer 
" common bread : but it becomes the Eucharist, 
" consisting of two parts, the earthly and the 
" heavenly 3 ." The earthly part is the substance 
of the bread itself : the heavenly part is what 
Ephrem calls the superadded spiritual grace. 

1 Gr. i)Q \pi\oig aprio Kal rw o'ivo). 

2 Gr. [xeraXafxfidvojv avrov (scil. aprov) u>g 7rrevi*ariKov. 

3 Iren. adv. hser. lib. iv. c. 34. p. 264. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



65 



3. His lordship, however, will say, that, accord- 
ing to Cyril, as the water in the marriage-feast at 
Cana was changed into wine, so the wine in the 
Eucharist is changed into blood. Now such an 
avowed comparison requires the two several 
transmutations to be understood homogeneously. 

I allow, that this would follow, if any avowed 
comparison really existed : but the truth is, as 
any person may satisfy himself by simply reading 
my perfectly accurate translation, Cyril makes no 
comparison whatsoever. He never once uses 
the correlative terms as and so. He only argues, 
that, if Christ wrought the one change, why 
should we doubt his power to work the other also ? 
That the two changes are homogeneous, he 
asserts not. If he had, he would in good truth 
have contradicted the purport of his own avowed 
comparison in the immediately preceding Cate- 
chesis. There, with the regular and distinct use 
of the formal terms as and so l , he directly and 
specially compares the change produced in the 
bread by consecration to the change produced in 
the chrism by consecration : thus unequivocally 
asserting his own persuasion, that these two se- 
veral changes are strictly homogeneous. 

" Ye are anointed with ointment : and ye have 
" become partakers of Christ. But take care, lest 
" you deem that ointment to be mere ointment 2 . 

1 Gr. (Sffirsp and ovtoj. Catech. Mystag. iii. p. 235. 

2 Gr. 4>i\6p : the identical word, which, in the subsequent 
Catechesis, he uses to express the not mere bread and wine. 

F 



66 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



" For, as the bread of the Eucharist, after the in- 
" vocation of the Holy Spirit, is no longer bare 
" bread ; but the body of Christ : so this holy 
" ointment, after the invocation, is no longer 
y mere ointment, nor (as one may say) common 
" ointment 1 ; but the gracious gift of Christ and 
u of the Holy Spirit, the presence of his own 
* deity 9 ." 

By virtue of consecration, the chrism is no 
longer mere chrism : by virtue of consecration, the 
bread is no longer mere bread. As the one is 
changed ; so is the other changed. In each case 
alike, according to the doctrine which Cyril thus 
avowedly taught to the Mystse, the change is 
moral, not substantial. If the Bishop, in despite 
of evidence, is determined to believe, that Cyril 
communicated the transubstantiation of the bread 
and wine, as the secret of the Eucharist : he must 
also believe, unless he can magnanimously disre- 
gard every claim of consistency, that Cyril com- 
municated the exactly parallel transubstantia- 
tion of the ointment, as the secret of the ancient 
Chrism. In each case, most assuredly, the only 
change, recognised by Cyril, was a moral change : 
odious as that word moral confessedly is to the 
sensitive ears of the Bishop. 

1 Gr. \pi\6v and koivov : the precise words, used by Cyril and 
Justin to express, that, after consecration, the bread and wine 
are not mere and common. 

2 Cyril. Catech. Myst. iii. p. 235. 

12 



CHAP. 111.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



G7 



4. Accordingly, in our present Catechesis which 
specially treats of the Eucharist, the bread and 
the wine, in their inward grace, are, with Cyril, 
spiritual bread and wine : and the table, which 
God has prepared for us, is a mystical and intel- 
lectual table. 

The very remarkable expression intellectual 1 is 
obviously fatal to the gross doctrine of a material 
Transubstantiation : for, unless all the proprieties 
of language be violated, intellect must ever stand 
directly contradistinguished to matter. 

5. Nor is this all. Cyril, like Augustine, blames 
the men of Capernaum for their want of spiritual 
understanding, in fancying 2 (as he expresses him- 
self,) that Christ had exhorted them to flesh-eat- 
ing 8 . 

If, then, in the judgment of Cyril, they only 
erroneously fancied that Christ exhorted them to 
flesh-eating : it clearly follows, that, also in the 
judgment of Cyril, Christ did not exhort them to 
any such practice. With this agrees the decision 
of Augustine, when treating of the self-same pas- 
sage in Holy Writ. He expressly declares, that, 
in his view of our Saviour's language to the men 
of Capernaum, we do not, when receiving the Eu- 
charist, eat the identical flesh, which was visible 

1 Gr. voy\ri\v. 

3 Gr. VO/jLi^OVTEQ. 

3 Gr. £7ri crapKocpayiav. The Latin translator, justly, though 
not quite literally, renders the expression, ad humanarwn car- 
nium esum. 

F 2 



68 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. Ill 



to human eyes ; and that we do not drink the 
identical blood, which was poured out on the 
cross : but, on the contrary, that the whole pro- 
cess of the sacrament must be spiritually under- 
stood 1 . 

The miserable evasion, to which, in commo 11 
with others of his brethren, the Bishop is content 
to resort, will not serve his purpose. He pretends 
to say, that Cyril and Augustine, in their com- 
ment upon Christ's language to the men of Ca- 
pernaum, denied not the doctrine of Transubstan- 
tiation as it is held in the Latin Church : for they 
spake only of the crude human flesh and blood of 
the Lord, as existing before his glorification 2 ; 
whereas the flesh and blood, into which the Latin 
Church believes the Elements to be transubstan- 
tiated, are his glorified or sublimated flesh and 
blood, as now actually existing in heaven. 

Such is the evasion : but it will not answer. 
For, in the first place, if the Elements be transub- 
stantiated into any flesh and blood, the men of 
Capernaum were right in believing that Christ 
exhorted them to flesh-eating 3 ; because the flesh 
of Christ has not (according to the whim of the 

1 August. Enarr. in Psalm, xcviii. Oper. vol. viii. p. 397. 

8 The language of the Romanists on this point is so disgust- 
ingly offensive, that I cannot pollute my paper with transcribing 
it. Suffice it to say, that it is full of illustrations borrowed from 
a butcher's shop. In somewhat more decent phraseology, I have 
given their argument, if argument it can be called. 

3 Gr. £7rt frapKo<f>ayiav. 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



69 



Eutychian heretics) ceased, by its glorification,, to 
be real and proper flesh : and, in the second place, 
when Christ originally instituted the Eucharist, 
and when (as the Latins believe) the first tran- 
substantiation of the Elements took place, his 
body was not glorified, but was in all physical pro- 
perties exactly like our bodies ; whence, if any 
transubstantiation then occurred, it must have 
been a transubstantiation of the Elements, into 
the identical crude flesh of Christ which imme- 
diately afterward hung upon the cross, and into 
the identical crude blood of Christ which imme- 
diately afterward was shed upon the cross ; the 
precise operation, expressly and in so many words 
denied by Augustine K 

But Augustine not only denies the doctrine of 
Transubstantiation dogmatically, as speaking the 
sense of the Catholic Church in his time : he de- 
nies it also, as a philologist, on strict and well 
defined principles of criticism. I might have in- 

1 To prevent any fresh quibbling on the part of the Roman 
school, I subjoin the ipsissima verba of Augustine. He para- 
phrases the words of our Lord in manner following. 

Spiritaliter intelligite, quod locutus sum. non hoc corpus, 
quod videtis, mandicaturi estis: nec bibituri ilium sanguinem, 
quern fusuri sunt, qui me crucifigent. Sacramentum aliquod 
vobis commendavi : spiritaliter intellectum vivificabit vos. Au- 
gust. Enarrat. in Psalm, xcviii. Oper. vol. viii. p. 397. 

Language, I think, cannot be more express. The consecrated 
elements are not the material body and blood of Christ : here 
we have the negative of the question. They auk to be under- 
stood spiritually : here we have the affirmative of the question. 



70 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. HI. 



serted his excellent canon in my Difficulties of 
Romanism : but, as, with many other important 
passages, I there omitted it ; I shall now adduce 
it, in the charitable hope of thereby more effec- 
tually illuminating the palpable darkness, which 
envelopes the Bishop and his associates. 

" In the interpretation of figurative passages, 
" let the following canon be observed. 

" If the passage be preceptive, either forbidding 
~ some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or 
" commanding something useful and beneficent : 
" then such passage is not figurative. But, if 
" the passage seems, either to command some fia- 
" gitious deed and some heinous crime, or to for- 
" bid something useful or beneficent : then such 
? passage is figurative. 

" Thus, for example, Christ says : Unless ye 
" shall eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink 
" his blood ; ye shall have no life in you. Now, 
" in these words, he seems to command a heinous 
" crime or a flagitious deed. Therefore the 
n passage is a figure, enjoining us to communi- 
** cate in the passion of our Lord, and admonish- 
" ing us to lay it up sweetly and usefully in our 
" memory : because, for us, his flesh was crucified 
" and wounded. 

" On the other hand, Scripture says : If thy 
" enemy shall hunger, give him food ; if he shall 
" thirst, give him drink. Here, without all doubt, 
" an act of beneficence is enjoined. But, as for 
" the passage which immediately follows ; This 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



71 



" doing, thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his 
" head: one might imagine, so far as the bare 
" words are concerned, that an action of heinous 
" malevolence was commanded. Under such cir- 
" cumstances, therefore, doubt not, that the pas- 
" sage was spoken figuratively. For, since it is 
" capable of a double interpretation, after one 
" mode to inflict an injury, after another mode to 
" confer a benefit : charity requires, that, by coals 
" °f fi re > y ou should understand the burning 
" groans of penitence, through which is healed 
* the pride of that person, who grieves that he 
" has been an enemy of the man that returns him 
'* good for evil by assisting him in his distress V 

Augustine, we may observe, both lays down a 
canon of criticism, and illustrates it by appropriate 
examples. Hence it is utterly impossible to mis- 
apprehend his meaning. Now the special ex- 
ample, which he has selected for the avowed pur- 
pose of illustrating the figurative interpretation 
of Scripture, is the precise text, which the Bishop 
rates me heartily, as no better than a fool or 
a knave (his lordship has not quite made up 
his mind as to which), for not understanding 
literally. 

s In exact correspondence with his professedly 
figurative exposition of Christ's words to the men 
of Capernaum, is Augustine's doctrine of the re- 
ception of the sacramental elements by unworthy 



1 August, de Doctrin. Christian, lib. iii. c. 15, 16. 



72 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



communicants 1 . He tells us, that the wicked 
must not be said to eat the body of Christ, since 
they cannot be reckoned among the members of 
Christ 3 : and, in this view of the question, J erome 
perfectly agrees with him, when he declares, that, 
while lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God 
are unholy in body and in spirit, they neither eat 
the flesh of Jesus, nor drink his blood 3 . 

Here we have the precise theology of the 
Church of England, but assuredly not that of the 

1 Some modern commentators have thought, that our Lord's 
discourse at Capernaum has no anticipatory reference to the 
institution of the Eucharist. In this opinion, they run counter, 
so far as my own reading has extended, to the judgment of the 
early Church. The matter, however, is of no consequence, so 
far as my present argument is concerned. It is enough for my 
purpose, that Cyril and Augustine understood the passage as 
referring to the Eucharist, and that by their comment upon it 
they indisputably exhibited their own views of that most holy 
sacrament. 

3 Nec isti ergo dicendi sunt manducare corpus Christi, quo- 
niam nec in membris computandi sunt Christi — Tanquam dice- 
ret : Qui non in me manet, et in quo ego non maneo, non se 
dicat aut existimet manducare corpus meum aut bibere sangui- 
nem meum. August, de Civ. Dei. lib. xxi. c. 25. 

3 Omnes voluptatis magis amatores, quam amatores Dei, — 
dum non sunt sancti corpore et spiritu, nec comedunt car- 
nem Jesu, nec bibunt sanguinem ejus. Hieron. Comm. in 
Esai. lxvi. 

Exactly the same doctrine had been maintained by Origen, 
more than a century before. 

Multa porro de ipso Verbo dici possent, quod factum est caro 
verusque cibus, quern qui comederit omnino vivet in seternum ; 
quem nullus malus potest edere. Orig. Comment, in Matt. xv. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



73 



modern innovating Church of Rome. According 
to the very necessity of the speculation advocated 
by the Bishop and his friends, all, both good and 
bad indifferently, who partake of the Eucharist, 
receive the body and blood of Christ : but, ac- 
cording to Jerome and Augustine and the Church 
of England, wicked recipients of the consecrated 
elements do not receive Christ's body and blood. 
The language of these two Fathers is utterly irre- 
concileable with the doctrine of Transubstantia- 
tion : for I presume I need not remind the Bishop 
of the many ingenious discussions, which in his 
Church have emanated from the abstract possibi- 
lity of the consecrated host being devoured by a 
mouse. 

Augustine, it will be remembered, knew the 
secret of the Eucharist, whatever that secret 
might be : and the secret in question, as the Bishop 
and myself are quite agreed, is indisputably com- 
municated in the fourth mystagogical Catechesis 
of Cyril. If, then, the secret universally commu- 
nicated in the lectures of each appointed Cate- 
chist, whereof Cyril's Work is confessedly an ac- 
credited specimen, were, as the Bishop contends, 
the precise modern Latin doctrine of Transub- 
stantiation : I shall be glad to learn, how we are 
to account either for the dogmatism or for the 
criticism of Augustine. That eminent Father 
must have heard a Catechesis from his own Cate- 
chist, the same in substance and in phraseology 
as the fourth mystagogical Catechesis of CyriL 



74 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



Whether, with the Bishop of Strasbourg, he un- 
derstood it to propound the doctrine of Transub- 
stantiation ; let the cautious reader judge, from 
his own perfectly unambiguous, though never ec- 
clesiastically censured, avowals. 

6. As Cyril had expressly compared the change 
in the Elements to the change in the Chrism : so, 
with perfect consistency, he tells his Mystae, that 
the body of Christ is given to them under the 
type or symbol of bread, and that his blood is 
given to them under the type or symbol of wine. 

On expressions of this description, which occur 
again and again in the writings of the early Fa- 
thers, the Bishop, in the course of his Answer, 
has exhausted all the stores of his misplaced in- 
genuity. If, in the judgment of Cyril, the body 
of Christ is given under the type or symbol or 
(as Clement of Alexandria speaks) allegory of 
bread : then, most clearly, the body typified must 
be one thing, and the bread typifying must be 
another thing. To say, that the type and the 
thing typified, or that the symbol and the thing 
symbolised, are identical, is nothing better than 
to talk rank nonsense. As well might we gravely 
assert, that the brazen serpent and Christ him- 
self are identical or that the rock in the wilde?*- 
ness and Christ himself are identical, as that the 
consecrated bread (when viewed with Cyril under 
the declared aspect of a type ) and Christ's body 
are identical. Modern Romanists, on the plan 
recommended by the Bishop, may, if they please, 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



75 



still use the phraseology of the ancients ; and 
thence may still call the bread the type of Christ's 
body, while yet they believe that same typical 
bread to be literally and substantially the very 
body itself: but their actual use of such language 
serves only to mark their own departure from the 
primitive faith and thus effectually to pronounce 
their own condemnation. At present, according 
to the Bishop, they seem, unless I wholly misun- 
derstand him, incongruously to retain the old 
language of the early Church ; which, in the 
mouth of us Anglicans, is perfectly correct : while 
they have widely departed from her ancient apos- 
tolic doctrines. But it was not thus, when Tran- 
substantiation was beginning to be broached 
within the walls even of the degenerate Church 
herself. The necessity of a correspondent change 
of phraseology was then felt and acted upon : and 
it is not a little curious to compare the language 
of the non-transubstantialist Cyril in the fourth 
century with the language of the transubstantialist 
John Damascene in the eighth. 

" Under the type of bread," says Cyril, " Christ's 
P body is given to thee : and, under the type of 
" wine, his blood is given to thee \" 

" The bread and wine," says the adventurous, 
though phraseologically consistent, innovator John, 
? are not the type of the body and blood of Christ ; 

- 1 'Ev TV7TM yap apTOv, cUdorcu oo\ to trwfjia* (ecu, kv tv7to) divov, 
moral aoi to aifia. Cyril. Catech. Myst. iv. p. 237. 



76 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



" God forbid ! but they are the very deified body 
" itself of the Lord ; the Lord himself having 
" said, This is not the type of my blood, but my 
"blood 1 ." 

With Cyril, the bread and wine are types : with 
John, they are not types. With Cyril, they are 
received spiritually on the mystical and intellec- 
tual table which God hath prepared before us : 
with John, they are the very substantial deified 
body and blood themselves. A change of senti- 
ment required a change of language. What was 
sound doctrine in the fourth century, was begin- 
ning to become rank heresy in the eighth. God 
forbid, says the pious zealot John, that the bread 
and wine should be types of Christ's body and 
blood! Why this God forbid to the old cate- 
chetical language of Cyril, which is precisely the 
same as the language of the other yet more an- 
cient Fathers ? The Church, in the eighth cen- 
tury, was apostatising from the doctrine of the 
Church in the fourth. 

It is impossible for a well-disposed Christian 
not to pity, though he may smile at, the ludicrous 
perplexity of the Fathers of the second Nicene 
Council, respecting this same unlucky word type. 
They had sagaciously decreed, in opposition to 

1 'OYK £<ttl tvttoq 6 aprog Kal 6 oIvoq tov cwjuaroc kcu cufiarog 
tov XpiaTov' fxri ytvoLTO' d\X avro to ffuifxa tov Kvpiov TeQew^it- 
voVf aWov tov Kvpiov eittovtoq, Tovto fiov kaTi 'OY tvttoq tov 
alfACLTos, dXXd 7-0 al/xa. Johan. Damasc. Orthod. Fid. lib. iv. 
c. 14. 



GHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



77 



the atheistical iconoclasts 1 who in the year 754 
sat in the Council of Constantinople,, that the 
Eucharist was not the image of Christ's body and 
blood, but the body and blood their own proper 
selves 2 . But here occurred a difficulty. Some 
better informed Minerva seems to have gently 
pulled them by the ear and to have reminded 
them in a courteous whisper, that, if the old or- 
thodox Fathers had not used the precise word 
image, they had again and again used the per- 
fectly equipollent words type and symbol and re- 
presentation and allegory 3 . What, then, was to 

1 For a specimen of the truly urbane and christian language 
of the Secundo-Nicene Fathers, see my Diff. of Rom. p. 260, 
261. 

2 Ovdelg ydp vote Tuiv aaXiriyyiov tov HvEvfiaTOQ dyiiov 
diroaToXtov, rj tiZv doidifiiov TraTEpojv r/fiuiv, Trjv dvalfiaxTOv fyuwj> 

OvcrtCLV, EITTEV EIKOVCL TOV CrOJfACtTOQ O.VT0V Kai OVK EITTE' Ad- 

I^ETEy (j)dy£T£, Trjv Ehova tov crufficiTOQ fiov — Ovkovv oatyioQ aVo^e- 

^ElKTai, OTl OV^ajJiOV OVTE 6 KvpiO£, OVTE Ol aVoOToXoi, rj TTCLTEpEQ, 
ElKOVa EITTOV Tr)v Zlh TOV lEpEOJQ TTpO(T(p£pOflEVr}V UVQlfiaiCTOV dv- 

oiav, a\\' ai/ro <rw/.ia Kai avro al/jia. Concil. Nicen. secund. 
act. vi. Labb. Concil. vol. vii. p. 448, 449. 

3 Yet Minerva herself, on the supposition that she thus al- 
lowed the accuracy of the well-read Fathers in their resolute as- 
sertion that no one of the old doctors of the Church had ever 
called the Eucharist an image in the sense of a similitude, will 
have evinced her liability to the respectable occasional trick of 
Homer, which has been immortalised by Horace. No less a 
personage than Pope Gelasius, toward the close of the fifth cen- 
tury, to say nothing of Theodoret of Cyrus, had been guilty of 
the identical misdemeanour ; which called down the hearty 
curses of the Secundo-Nicene Fathers, upon the supposed on- 



78 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[[CHAP. III. 



be done with this stubborn fact ? Had such a 
commentator as the Bishop of Strasbourg been at 
their elbow, they would have had no difficulty. 
With Grodecius and other ingenious gentlemen 
among the more modern Transubstantialists, this 
theological Isaac Tzetzes would have told them, 
that the word type, in the hands of Cyril, meant 
only the outward form or appearance or species ; 
inasmuch as the consecrated Elements retained 
their original accidents, though they had lost 
their original substance : and he would have 
added, to their entire satisfaction, that it was in 
no wise to be understood in the sense of a symbol 

ginality of the atheists, who sat at Constantinople, and who 
condemned Image-worship and Transubstantiation. 

Esse non desinit substantia vel natura panis et vini. Et 
certe imago et similitudo corporis et sanguinis Christi in ac- 
tione mysteriorum celebrantur. Gelas. de duab. Christ, natur. 
apud Biblioth. Patr. vol. iv. p. 422. See also Theod. Dial. ii. 
Oper. vol. iv. p. 85. 

• Whether the Constantinopolitan miscreants pilfered their 
word image from Pope Gelasius or from good Theodoret with- 
out the proper acknowledgment, I pretend not to say. Certain 
it is, however, that the Nicene Fathers were mistaken in ascrib- 
ing to them the merit of its invention. The Bishop of Stras- 
bourg, with much laudable contempt and not having the fear of 
Pope Gelasius before his eyes, styles the mad and foolish and 
false and impious and rash and bold and atheistical and barking- 
Synod of Constantinople the Conciliabulum. Compare Answer, 
p. 24, with Concil. Nic. sec. act. i. Labb. Concil. vol. vii. p. 56, 
57. When I recollect the overwhelming eloquence of the year 
787, I marvel that the Bishop should have let the iniquitous 
wretches off so easily. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



79 



or figure or image or allegorical representation. 
But, unluckily, this brilliant thought never once 
struck the poor blundering Fathers. They adopted 
quite a different plan. Tacitly acknowledging, 
what as Greeks they could not conveniently deny, 
that the words type and image, as applied to the 
eucharistic Elements, were theologically equipol- 
lent ; and at the same time conscious, that the 
earlier Fathers had used the word type to express 
the relation of the Elements to the body and blood 
of Christ : they, at one brave bound, cleared the 
whole difficulty by the round assertion, that, 
whenever the ancient Fathers styled the Elements 
types, they so styled them, only he/ore consecra- 
tion, not after consecration. While yet uncon- 
secrated, the bread and wine were doubtless types 
or symbols of the body and blood of Christ : but, 
as soon as they were consecrated, they forthwith 
ceased to be types or symbols, and became the 
actual or substantial body and blood themselves 1 . 

The evasion is amusing enough ; particularly 
when we recollect, that Cyril and Augustine and 
Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria all concur 
(as the Bishop very well knows) in styling the 
Elements a type or a sign or a figure or a symbol 
or a representation or an allegory, not before, 
but after, consecration : yet it abundantly shews, 

1 Upd [lev rrjg rov dyiaffjiov reAeiwcewg, avTiTvita Tiai twv 
dylwv irarEpwv evaefiiog tlo&v ovofid^eadat. Concil. Nic. sec. 
act. vi. Labb. Concil. vol. vii. p. 449. 



80 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. III. 



that, for once in his life, though it be only in a 
point of philology, the Rector of Long-Newton has 
the rare felicity of symbolising with the Fathers of 
the second Nicene Council. Those Fathers being 
confessedly infallible, it is a clear case that the 
Rector cannot be mistaken in his account of the 
word type. Yet, while secure himself under the 
wing of the Council, he trembles for the tottering 
orthodoxy of Grodecius and the Bishop of Stras- 
bourg. Those gentlemen, in opposition to the 
Council, assure us, that the word type, as em- 
ployed by Cyril, denotes only outward form or 
appearance or species : the Rector, on the con- 
trary, in full accordance with the Council, is quite 
sure, that this same word, in the mouth of Cyril, 
denotes a symbol or image or figure or allegori- 
cal representation ; and he distinctly perceives, 
moreover, that the certainty of its bearing this 
precise sense caused it to be rejected, with such 
an overflow of holy indignation, by good John of 
Damascus. 

7. The Bishop, however, by way of finally 
helping his forlorn argument, would fain exhibit 
Cyril as inculcating the adoration of the conse- 
crated Elements : whence he would have us infer, 
that Cyril must have revealed to his Mystas the 
secret of Transubstantiation. 

Cyril inculcates no such thing : nor did he ever 
dream of this horrible profanation. The passage, 
which is to establish the Bishop's assertion, occurs 
at the very end of the fifth and last mystagogical 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



81 



Catechesis : and, as I have no particular reason 
to quarrel with his lordship's version, I shall give 
the place in his own words. 

* After having thus received the body of Jesus 
* Christ, approach to the chalice of his blood, 
" not extending your hands, but bowing in an 
" attitude of homage and adoration, and answer- 
" ing — Amen V 

What Cyril prescribes, we Anglicans practise : 
but, as we bow in an attitude of adoration, not 
to the unconscious Elements, but to the Almighty 
Triune God ; so Cyril gives not the slightest inti- 
mation, that this act of homage was to be ad- 
dressed to the bread and wine. The Greek term 
itself, as every schoolboy knows, is abstractedly 
ambiguous 2 . Here Cyril apparently uses it in 
that highest sense, which the Romanists call La- 
tvia: whenever it respects the mere Elements 
themselves, as it occasionally does in the phra- 
seology of the old ecclesiastical writers, we ought 
doubtless to understand it in the common lowered 
sense of respect or veneration 3 . 

By some unlucky oversight, the Bishop has for- 
gotten to remind his readers, that, although the 
passage affords but a very bad argument for the 
adoration of the Eucharist, it affords excellent 

1 Cyril. Catech. Myst. v. p. 245. 2 Gr. irpoaicvvriaEUQ. 

3 Thus, when Orthodoxus in Theodoret says of the Elements, 
which avowedly remain in their former substance, ko.\ irpocr- 
kvpeItcii : he undoubtedly says only, that they are decently 
revered, 

G 



82 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



evidence that the early Church was grievously 
tainted with the heresy of administering the holy 
sacrament in both kinds to the Laity no less than 
to the Clergy. Since the time of Cyril, the des- 
perate fautors of that manifest pravity have been 
very properly cursed, to their heart's content, by 
the Council of Constance. 

II. I have now shewn, that, in point of just 
construction and as viewed connectedly with the 
language of Augustine and others of the Fathers, 
the fourth mystagogical Catechesis of Cyril does 
not teach, as the secret of the Eucharist, the Latin 
doctrine of Transubstantiation : I shall next shew, 
that, in point of naked fact, the listening Mystse, 
to whom it was addressed, did not understand it 
to teach any such doctrine. 

This last matter is, I think, perfectly decisive 
of the question. Let the Bishop labour, as long 
as he pleases, to establish the theory of his pre- 
tended secret : still, if, in point of fact, the Mystae 
learned no such secret from the lectures of Cyril 
and from the other similar lectures of the ancient 
Catechists, or, in other words, if the Mystae did 
not understand their teachers to communicate 
any such secret as that for which the Bishop con- 
tends ; it will be certain, that no such secret either 
was, or could have been, communicated by the 
Catechists in their revelation of the Christian 
Mysteries *. 

1 The Bishop, on his own principles, is constrained to admit, 
that, whatever secret was taught by Cyril, that same secret 

12. 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



83 



1. My proof from the present position I draw 
from the very remarkable case of the Emperor 
Julian : a case, which demonstratively shews, 
both that the doctrine of Transubstantiation could 
not have been the secret of the Eucharist, and 
likewise that that doctrine was not the faith of 
the fourth century ; a case, which the Bishop has 
painfully but ineffectually attempted to set aside. 

The Emperor Julian had been baptised 1 . Hence, 
according to the then established discipline of the 
Church, whatever was the secret of the Eucha- 
rist, to him (the Bishop himself being judge) that 
secret must have been communicated. Such being 
the indisputable fact, if the doctrine of Transub- 
stantiation were the secret of the Eucharist, the 

must have been taught by all the other Catechists in all the 
other Churches. Hence the Catecheses of Cyril may be justly 
viewed as a specimen of the Catecheses, which in his time were 
ordinarily delivered for the purpose of communicating the Mys- 
teries. Another set of catechetical lectures by the great Au- 
gustine has come down to us. On the Bishop's hypothesis, 
some one of these lectures ought to have communicated the 
secret of Transubstantiation : but even he has not attempted to 
extract it from this grievously unpromising quarry. If Transub- 
stantiation were the secret of the Eucharist, how came Augus- 
tine never once to communicate it to his Mystse ? Truly, the 
light of Africa and the West was dreadfully negligent in the per- 
formance of his duty. Yet, from the account given of his opi- 
nions, above, such neglect is not quite unaccountable. What- 
ever becomes of his orthodoxy, the learned Father has at least 
been consistent. See the notice of Augustine's Lectures in my 
Diff. of Rom. p. 111. 

1 Sozom. Hist. Eccles. lib. v. c. 2. 

G 2 



84 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[[chap. HI. 



doctrine of Transubstantiation must inevitably 
have been communicated to Julian. 

Now, after his apostasy, as we learn in rich 
abundance from his numerous yet extant writ- 
ings, he again and again ridicules every doctrine 
of Christianity, which, with the profane, might be 
thought in any measure capable of ridicule : and 
yet, in the midst of his unhallowed merriment, 
never once does he scoff at the Bishop's fancied 
secret, the doctrine of Transubstantiation. 

Here we have an indisputable fact : can we 
account for it by any delicate forbearance on the 
part of the Emperor ? 

Assuredly not. We all know, how painfully 
irritable the modern Romanists are on the topic 
of their favourite doctrine : and we may be quite 
sure, that the grand secret of the Mysteries (the 
secret, on account of which, so far as I can under- 
stand the Bishop, those Mysteries were specially 
instituted) would be even preeminently venerated 
by the early Christians. Julian, therefore, in pos- 
session of their cherished secret, would know, that 
here he could wound them where they were most 
susceptible. Hence we may be morally certain, 
that, if Transubstantiation had been that secret, 
Transubstantiation would have been not merely 
ridiculed in brief hy the Emperor, but would have 
been made the standing and most prominent 
topic of his ridicule. Yet never once does he 
even so much as allude to it. 

This simple fact speaks volumes i and, when I 



CHAP. III.)] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



85 



adduce the yet additional fact, that the doctrine 
of the Trinity is actually ridiculed by a contem- 
porary buffoon under the precise aspect of being, 
what accordingly Jerome represents it to be, the 
special and peculiar and palmary secret of the 
Christian Mysteries ; my proof is absolutely per- 
fect 1 . In the face of such a proof from naked 
facts, all the Bishop's tortuous pleading is worth 
just nothing. The doctrine of Transubstantiation 
was never understood to be taught either by 
Cyril or by any other Catechist, and was utterly 
unknown to the Catholic Church of the fourth 
century. 

2. Against these facts, what does the Bishop 
set up ? He ventures not to deny the strict ac- 
curacy of my assertion. What, therefore, can- 
not be safely denied, must be plausibly managed. 
Hence, in his answer, he confines himself entirely 
to the fragments of Julian's Work against Chris- 
tianity ; thus dexterously insinuating to his un- 
suspicious Latin readers, that no other Works of 
Julian are extant, and that my argument rested 
upon the silence of those fragments exclusively : 
while he totally suppresses any mention of the 
Emperor's other Works ; though the equal silence 
of those other Works constituted, in truth, the 
very strength of my reasoning. 

(1.) With respect to the fragments, he argues 
in manner following. 



J Sec my Diff. of Rom. p. 106, 112, 113. 



86 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



Of Julian's Work against Christianity a part 
only has been preserved by Cyril of Alexandria. 
Whence, says the Bishop, " it may be easily sup- 
" posed, that the author had deferred speaking of 
" the Eucharist till the second or third book ; and 
" then, of course, it would be no wonder to find 
" nothing of it in the first 1 ." Furthermore, Julian 
mmj have ridiculed the doctrine even in his first 
book : and Cyril may have designedly suppressed 
it. At all events, no one can now prove, that Julian 
did not ridicule it in his first book. " We are 
" much inclined to think," gravely remarks the 
Bishop, " that St. Cyril would take great care not 
" to give greater publicity to the raillery of Julian 
" against the holy Eucharist. How, indeed, could 
" he have reported them, or could he have de- 
" fended our dogmas, without attracting the no- 
" tice and attention of the pagans to our mys- 
" teries, and by such indiscretion injured the 
" discipline of the secret, as well as the precept of 
" our divine Legislator ? This is not merely a 
" conjecture thrown out at hazard 2 ." His lordship 
then, by way of establishing his more than con- 
jecture, cites a passage from Cyril, in which that 
Father, after censuring Julian's profane ridicule 
of the sacrament of Baptism, remarks : that the 
Emperor " adds other insipid jokes and old 
" nurses' tales, and says afterward that this 
" lustral water is without power or virtue against 



1 Answer, p. 284, 285. 



3 Answer, p. 286. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



87 



" bodily diseases V The other insipid jokes and 
old nurses' tales (which, by the very necessity 
of their context in the Bishop's own citation from 
Cyril, plainly refer to Baptism 2 ) his lordship feli- 
citously conjectures to refer to Transubstantia- 
tion ; when, all the while, the sacrament of the 

1 Answer, p. 286, 287. 

2 " This grave philosopher," says Cyril as quoted by the 
Bishop, " affects to laugh at what ought rather to be to him 
" a source of self-gratification : he is utterly ignorant of the 
" efficacy of the sacred water of Baptism ; he is pleased to ridi- 
" cule what is the most holy thing in the world, and congratu- 
" late those, who, having believed in Jesus Christ, have had the 
" happiness to find a miraculous water which removes every 
u stain and has cleansed them from head to foot. He adds other 
u insipid jokes and old nurses' tales : and he says afterward, 
" that this lustral water is without power or virtue against 
" bodily diseases. But know, O wise and illustrious teacher, 
" that we do not apply the virtue of Baptism to the cure of the 
" body nor to things perceptible by the senses." Answer, p. 
286, 287. 

Let the intelligent reader judge from the context, whether it 
be possible, on any consistent principles of composition, for the 
other insipid jokes and old nurses 9 tales to relate to any thing 
save Julian's witticisms on Baptism. The very word other de- 
termines the relation of the phrase : and the subsequent word 
afterward seals its appropriation. Julian, as Cyril remarks, 
says many ridiculous things against Baptism, which have already 
been enumerated : he adds other insipid jokes and old nurses' 
tales : and he says afterward, that this lustral water is without 
power or virtue against bodily diseases. Yet, with a splendid 
disregard of context, the Bishop would fain persuade his readers, 
that the other insipid jokes were the Emperor's jokes upon Tran- 
substantiation ! Most true is the proverb, that the drowning 
man will catch at straws. 



88 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP, mi 



Eucharist is not the matter under discussion : and 
he, yet even more happily, supposes, that Cyril's 
taciturnity may be well accounted for, by the hy- 
pothesis of his dread of communicating the secret 
to the profane ; when, at this precise time, the 
secret, if any such secret ever existed, had already 
(according to his own mode of solving my diffi- 
culty) been blazoned to the whole world, with the 
most contemptuous ridicule, by Julian himself ! 
His lordship, in short, first conjectures, that Julian 
dM ridicule Transubstantiation in his Work against 
Christianity : and next conjectures, that Cyril 
dared not to notice this supposed attack, lest he 
should publish to the world of the profane what 
Julian had already most kindly saved him the 
trouble of publishing ! 

(2.) Here, then, we have the Bishop's entire 
case made out in form : a tissue of inconsistent 
guess-work upon a part of Julian's writings ; while 
the remainder of the Emperor's productions is as 
completely suppressed as if they had never existed 
or had never been adduced by me. The value of 
the guess-work we have seen : the amount of the 
suppression, a portly folio, we have next to con- 
sider. 

From his lordship's answer to an argument, 
which I still venture to deem perfectly irresistible, 
would not any person, who had never perused my 
Difficulties of Romanism, imagine, that nothing 
of Julian's writings had come down to us save the 
fragments preserved by Cijril, and consequently 



CHAP. III.] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



89 



that I had appealed to no documents save the frag- 
ments in question? The whole purport of his 
answer would inevitably lead to such a supposi- 
tion : for he rests it entirely upon the basis,, that 
we have not Julian's Work against Christianity 
complete ; and, therefore, that, from the Empe- 
ror's silence in what remains, we cannot legiti- 
mately infer his silence in what is lost. 

The inconclusiveness of such reasoning, I re- 
quire not, from the Bishop, a lecture on Dialectics 
to teach me : nor should I ever have thought of 
adducing Julian in evidence, if nothing of his 
writings had come down to us, save the fragments 
preserved hy Cyril. But, most unluckily for his 
lordship's reply, this is not the fact. Respecting 
the si%e of Julian's Works, independently of the 
fragments in Cyril , the Bishop very possibly may 
be ignorant : respecting their existence he could 
not be ignorant ; for I have appealed to them, again 
and again, with references most scrupulously ac- 
curate. Let the unsuspecting reader learn then, 
what the Bishop either could not or would not 
tell him, that the Works of Julian, independently 
of the fragments preserved hy Cyril, constitute 
a goodly folio volume of 455 pages. The whole 
of this volume have I perused with the most edi- 
fying perseverance : and thus I can assert, from 
my own bodily inspection, that, although the Em- 
peror, again and again, usque ad nauseam, ridi- 
cules all the grand peculiarities of the Gospel; 
never once, through the entire 455 folio pages, 



> 



90 SUPPLEMENT TO THE £CHAP. III. 

does he say a syllable about Transubstantiation. 
Here we have no paradoxical dread, on the part 
of Cyril, lest, by boldly meeting the Emperor, he 
should reveal a secret, which (by the Bishop's 
hypothesis) the Emperor had already revealed. 
Cyril is out of the question. Through 455 folio 
pages, Julian speaks in his own person ; no cor- 
rective Patriarch being at hand to suppress ( more 
Strashurgico ) what it were decent and convenient 
to suppress. The Emperor has full swing : and 
truly he does not spare the hated Galileans and 
their execrable superstition. But, in the very midst 
of his merriment, Transubstantiation is too sacred 
a theme to be touched. The relligio loci still ad- 
heres to the garments of the partially scrupulous 
apostate. Every other doctrine of Christianity 
he freely ridicules : Transubstantiation alone he 
never once mentions. 

Let the Bishop, on his theory of the secret dis- 
cipline, account, if he be able, for a fact, which 
he has indeed prudently suppressed, but which I 
more than suspect he will not venture to contro- 
vert. On his lordship's hypothesis, the baptised 
Julian, having indisputably received the secret, 
must have known the doctrine of Transubstantia- 
tion. Yet, with most exemplary forbearance and 
with most delicate respect for the feelings of the 
hated Galileans, the kind-hearted Emperor re- 
frains systematically from ridiculing the precise 
doctrine, which, as all the world knows, lies above 
all others most open to ridicule. Nay, even in his 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



91 



numerous epistles, which are addressed to his pri- 
vate friends, and which were never likely to meet 
the eyes of his Christian contemporaries, he still 
exhibits the same very amiable abstinence. In 
these minor compositions, he freely, it is true, 
gives the reins to his love of banter : but there is 
one subject too sacred even for Julian to handle, 
in the very familiarity and confidence of epistolary 
correspondence. Ridicule what he may, he never 
ridicules Transubstantiation. 

I can assure the Bishop, and with him all my 
Latin brethren, that the well-known banter of 
Dean Swift on this identical topic can scarcely be 
more offensive to them, than it is to myself: and 
most sorry should I be to wound the mind of any 
honest, though woefully misled, Romanist, by in- 
troducing ribald ridicule into such a subject. Yet 
can any man, who (like Mr. Butler for instance) 
has paid the least attention to legal evidence, be- 
lieve, that Julian would have passed over in total 
silence, what Swift has ludicrously brought for- 
ward as the most prominent and the most won- 
derful exploit of Lord Peter? The disgraceful 
banter of the Dean is proof positive, to all suc- 
ceeding generations, that, when he wrote, the doc- 
trine of Transubstantiation was the universally re- 
ceived doctrine of the Latin Church. Banter of a 
similar description, on the part of Julian, would 
equally, to us, have been proof positive, that the 
doctrine of Transubstantiation was the universally 
received doctrine of the Catholic Church of the 



92 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



fourth century. But Swift speaks : and Julian is 
silent. Why this marked difference, I pray you ? 
The doctrine existed in the time of Swift : it ex- 
isted not in the time of Julian. 

III. It is the nature of tradition to be cumula- 
tive. What it possesses, it may, in lapse of time, 
increase or distort : but it will not often altoge- 
ther lose its original deposit. 

On this principle, though the ascertained exist- 
ence of the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the 
second century would be ample proof, that it must 
also have existed in the fifth : yet the ascertained 
non-existence of the doctrine in the fifth would 
compel us to conclude, that it could by no possi- 
bility have existed in the second. 

A positive proof of this description I adduced 
from Theodoret ; a proof, which of course yet ad- 
ditionally demonstrates that Cyril of Jerusalem, 
in the fourth century, could not possibly have 
communicated, as the secret of the Eucharist, a 
doctrine, which was rejected by the Catholic 
Church in the fifth century : and the Bishop, ac- 
cording to his wont, has mistranslated one part 
of the evidence, has suppressed another part, and 
has laboured to distort the remainder from its ob- 
vious and necessary meaning. 

The Eutychians, in the fifth century, took it into 
their heads to maintain, that the body of Christ, 
after his ascension, was substantially changed into 
the divine essence : and, by way of illustrating 
this phantasy, they now, for the first time, in the 



CHAP. Ill/] 



DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



93 



form of an argumentum ad hominem, started the 
doctrine of eucharistic Transubstantiation. 

You Catholics, they argued, believe, that, " as 
" the symbols of the Lord's body and blood are 
" one thing before the sacerdotal invocation ; but 
" that, after the invocation, they are transmuted 
" and become another thing : so the Lord's body, 
" after its assumption, is transmuted into the di- 
" vine substance 1 ." 

I need scarcely remark, that the Eutychians, 
consistently with their principles, could never 
themselves have held the doctrine of eucharistic 
Transubstantiation : for, believing that the human 
body of Christ was transmuted or absorbed into 
the divine substance, they obviously could never 
have imagined that the bread and wine were tran- 
substantiated into flesh and blood, which, on their 
hypothesis, existed no longer 2 . But, building 

1 Theod. Dial. ii. Oper. vol. iv. p. 84. 

3 The Bishop has strangely misapprehended the whole drift 
both of the argument and of the reply. Not having had the 
sagacity to perceive, what few could have overlooked, that the 
argument of Eranistes is an argumentum ad hominem, he unac- 
countably fancies, that the whole dispute respected the sort of 
sacramental Transubstantiation : Eranistes stoutly contending 
for a transubstantiation of the bread into the Godhead ; while 
Orthodoxus, fiercely but somewhat more rationally, maintained, 
that it was only transubstantiated into Christ's human body. 
Answer, p. 272. 

As for any transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the 
Godhead, Eranistes is profoundly silent : and, crack-brained as 
the Eutychians were, I need scarcely remark the utter impossi- 



94 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



upon the phraseology which had always been 
employed by Catholics, they affected to under- 

bility of any man out of Bedlam believing that the visible and 
material elements were transubstantiated into the invisible and 
immaterial Godhead, while yet they themselves remained both 
visible and material. The truth is, as fully appears from the 
Bishop's own enlarged citation (for he has generously, quoted 
much, which I had omitted as quite irrelevant, though it now 
proves to be useful in correcting his well nigh incredible mis- 
take which no human foresight could have anticipated): the 
truth is, Eranistes dexterously works up Orthodoxus, by a series 
of questions, to the verbally precise point which he wished ; 
and then pounces upon him with an argumentum ad hominem 
constructed upon his own words, taken in the sense wherein 
Eranistes found it convenient for his purpose to take them. 

" Eran. What call you the offered gift, previous to the sa- 
" cerdotal invocation ? 

" Orthod. I must not speak distinctly : for some of the un- 
" initiated may be present. 

" Eran. Let your answer, then, be enigmatical. 

" Orthod. Food prepared from such and such grains. 

" Eran. But how do you call the other symbol ? 

" Orthod. This also is a common name, denoting a kind of 
" drink. 

"Eran. But, after consecration, how do you call these 
" things 1 

" Orthod. The body of Christ and the blood of Christ. 
" Eran. And do you believe, that you partake of the body 
" and blood of Christ ? 
" Orthod. So I believe. 

M Eran. As, then, the symbols of the Lord's body and blood 
" are one thing before the sacerdotal invocation; but, after 
** the invocation, are transmuted and become another thing : so 
" the Lord's body, after its assumption, is transmuted into 
"the divine substance. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



95 



stand it in the modern Latin sense of eucharistic 
Transubstantiation : and thence, charging upon 

" Orthod. You are caught in your own net. For the mys- 
<{ tical symbols, after consecration, pass not out of their own 
" nature. For they remain in their former substance and shape 
" and appearance : and they are seen and touched, such as 
" they were before. But they are understood to be what they 
" have become ; and they are believed, and venerated, as being 
" those things which they are believed. Compare, therefore, the 
" image with the archetype ; and you will perceive their resem- 
" blance : for the type must needs be similar to the truth." 

The intelligent reader will perceive, that, through the whole 
process of catechising to which Eranistes subjects Orthodoxus, 
it is perpetually You and You and You. At length Eranistes 
brings his adversary to say, much in the same language as that 
which occurs in the Catechesis of Cyril, / call the elements 
after consecration the body and blood of Christ, and I believe 
that I partake of that body and blood. On this confession 
Eranistes immediately pounces: and, interpreting it transub- 
stantiatively, he forthwith constructs his argumentum ad homi- 
nem, built indeed upon the words of Orthodoxus, but built 
upon them according to the novel gloss of Eranistes. Ortho- 
doxus, however, is not thus to be entrapped. He flatly denies 
the occurrence of any sacramental transubstantiation ; and 
assures his antagonist, that his words, as understood by the 
Catholic Church, convey no such extraordinary and unheard of 
meaning. Thus, at once, he effectually stultifies the inductive 
argument of Eranistes. 

I have given the reader the whole passage : and, if he doubt 
the possibility of any living soul ever fancying, that the two 
disputants were warmly wrangling, whether the bread was 
transubstantiated into the invisible and immaterial Godhead, 
or whether it was only transubstantiated into the material and 
visible flesh of Christ ; I beg, as an effectual cure for his not 
unreasonable scepticism, to refer him to the Bishop of Stras- 



98 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



their antagonists the doctrine of a material or sub- 
stantial change in the consecrated Elements, they 
ingeniously constructed a not unplausible argu- 
mentum ad hominem. 

Now, in what manner, I ask, would a modern 
Latin deal with such an argument in the mouth 
of such a speculatist ? 

Obviously he would reply : Your illustration 
sets forth a doctrine perfectly sound in itself ; 
and you justly remark, that we hold the tenet of 
sacramental Transubstantiation. But what has 
this to do with the wild notion, which you have 
adopted? The transubstantiation of the bread 
and wine into the body and blood of Christ can- 
not be doubted : but this affords no proof, that 
Christ's body, after his ascension, was transmuted 
or absorbed into the substance of the Deity. 

Thus would a modern Romanist argue against 
an Eutychian : and, with his views, he would 
argue very justly. But, in Theodoret, the perso- 
nification of Orthodoxy, as Orthodoxy stood in 
the fifth century, adopts a totally different mode 
of confutation. Instead of admitting the pre- 
mises and denying the conclusion of the Euty- 
chian argument, Orthodoxus sets out with flatly 

bourg's Answer to the Difficulties of Romanism, part ii. chap. 
4. p. 271, 272. I have been particularly accurate in my re- 
ference : because every man, who makes an extraordinary as- 
sertion respecting his antagonist (which, at present, I admit to 
be the case with myself), ought to give the justly suspicious 
reader an ample opportunity of verification. 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



97 



denying the premises themselves : that is to say, 
he altogether denies the illustrative transubstan- 
tiation of the Elements into the body and blood 
of Christ, as alleged by Eranistes in his professed 
argumentum ad hominem. 

" You are caught in your own net. For the 
" mystical symbols, after consecration, pass not 
" out of their own nature. For they remain in 
" their former substance and shape and appear- 
ce ance : and they are seen and touched, such as 
" they were before. But they are understood to 
" be what they have become ; and they are be- 
" lieved, and venerated, as being those things 
" which they are believed. Compare, therefore, 
" the image with the archetype ; and you will 
66 perceive their resemblance : for the type must 
" needs be similar to the truth V 

This reply of Orthodoxus affords a complete 
and satisfactory comment upon that Catechesis of 
Cyril, in which, as the Bishop and myself are 
fully agreed, he sets forth to the Mystse the pri- 
mitive doctrine of the Eucharist. But what was 
that doctrine ? Was it the modern Latin doc- 
trine of Transubstantiation ? Nothing of the sort. 
The Elements, when consecrated, are revered, 
as having become mystically or figuratively or 
spiritually (as Cyril speaks) the body and blood 
of Christ ; bearing the same relation to the reality, 
as an image bears to its archetype or as a type 



1 Theod. Dial. ii. Oper. vol. iv. p. 85. 
H 



98 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



bears to the truth : and, in this sense, they are 
no longer bread and wine ; that is to say, they 
are no longer mere and common bread and wine. 
But still the mystical symbols, after consecra- 
tion, pass not out of their own nature : for they 
remain in their former substance and shape 
and appearance. Remaining, therefore, in their 
former or original substance, they of course are 
not transubstantiated: for it were a contradiction 
in terms to say, that a thing is transubstantiated, 
which all the while remains in its original sub- 
stance. Thus the childish argumentum ad homi- 
nem of the Eutychian, which was built only upon 
a gross perversion of the well-understood phrase- 
ology of the Catechist, is at once set aside by a 
mere simple statement of what was really meant 
by such phraseology. The mystical symbols, 
after consecration, pass not out of their own 
nature: for they remain in their former sub- 
stance and shape and appearance. 

A plain man will wonder, how this positive his- 
torical testimony against the modern Latin doc- 
trine of Transubstantiation can be disposed of: 
but, to the Bishop of Strasbourg, his worst ene- 
mies will never impute any want of jesuitical ma- 
nagement. 

By mistranslating, with matchless effrontery, 
the most important part of the reply of Ortho- 
doxus ; by introducing a gloss upon his phrase- 
ology, in case the mistranslation should be pounced 
upon by the not quite unwatchful Rector ; and 
10 



CHAP. 111.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 99 

by totally suppressing some certain language of 
the worthy personification of ancient Orthodoxy, 
which / had duly noticed and discussed : by these 
three media, the Bishop, with an expression of 
sovereign contempt for my own odd taste in ob- 
stinately remaining among the Catechumens when 
I might freely learn from his lordship the disci- 
pline of the secret, claims to have enervated a 
most troublesome piece of direct historical testi- 
mony. It is true, that he makes Orthodoxus 
talk rank irrelevant nonsense, by putting into his 
mouth a reply which is no reply to the argument 
of Eranistes : but the ludicrous inconsecutiveness 
of Orthodoxus, as Orthodoxus is exhibited by the 
Bishop of Strasbourg, is of small consequence ; 
provided only, in defiance of grammar and of lan- 
guage, the grand idol of the Roman Church can 
be preserved from utter destruction. My words 
are severe, I admit : but the conduct of my un- 
candid and disingenuous adversary compels me to 
give him no quarter. I am absolutely constrained, 
by himself, to demolish him without mercy, root 
and branch, bark and foliage. 

1. Orthodoxus, as we have seen, speaking of 
the mystical symbols after consecration, says, that 
They remain in their former substance and shape 
and appearance K But the Bishop thinks proper 

1 MeVei yap etti Trjg irpoTepag ovtriag ical tov c^juaroc *cat row 

In my version of this place, as it stands in the Difficulties of 
Romanism, I rendered the word irporepae original, simply to 

H 2 



100 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



to make him say, that They remain in the shape 
and form of the former substance K 

The difference, between what Orthodoxus really 
says and what the Bishop (for his own private 
ends) compels him to say, is quite intelligible. 
Orthodoxus asserts, that the symbols, after conse- 
cration, remain, not only in their original shape 
and appearance which are what the schoolmen 

avoid the cacophonous jingle of former and form in the same 
English clause. 

For so high a misdemeanour I am strenuously reviled by the 
Gallican critic of the proprieties of my native language. In the 
judgment of the Bishop, there is some mysterious difference in 
the import of the two English words original and former ; and 
the Rector, who knew well what he was about, unworthily, that 
is to say, dishonestly, substituted the one for the other. 

As the Rector, with his imperfect knowledge of the English 
tongue, cannot discern what he gained, save a rather better 
sounding sentence, by the adoption of the word original, he now 
freely gives it up, and accommodates the Bishop by rendering 
TcporepaQ former : at the same time, as he mortally hates a ca- 
cophony, he craves permission of his lordship to render <7xnfxdrog 
shape instead of form, as it originally stood ; and he assures 
him, in verbo sacerdotis, that he has really no secret evil inten- 
tion in this new translation. 

The most exalted part of the story is, that, while the Bishop 
is reviling me for dishonestly translating Trporspag original instead 
of former ; he himself, with audacity unparalleled, is actually, 
by a most grossly false translation, perverting the entire clause 
from its true meaning, that so, in the eyes of illiterate readers, 
it may cease to bear testimony against the doctrine of Transub- 
stantiation. See Answer, p. 270, 271. and see Diff. of Rom. 
p. 140. 

1 Answer, p. 270. 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



101 



call accidents, but in their former very substance 
or essential substratum likewise. The Bishop, on 
the contrary, with a magnanimous disregard of 
the original Greek, compels him to assert nothing 
more, than that they remain in the still existing 
accidents of their former substance, namely shape 
and form ; though the substance itself has been 
changed into the substance of the literal body and 
blood of Christ. 

They remain," says Orthodoxus through the 
medium of the perfectly unambiguous Greek of 
Theodoret, " in their former substance and form 
" and appearance." 

" They remain," says the same Orthodoxus when 
placed upon the rack by the Bishop of Strasbourg, 
" in the shape and form of the former substance." 

This is the man, who, for the sake of imposing 
upon the unwary, has turned his whole Answer 
into a tissue of false accusations against myself. I 
desire nothing more, than that any person, who is 
acquainted with Greek, will compare the Bishop's 
most dishonestly interested translation with the. 
genuine original of Theodoret. 

Mevei yap, says Orthodoxus in his own language, 

£7rt rr\Q irpoTBpaQ '0Y2IA2 Koi tov a^v^arog Kai tov 

£L§OVQ. 

2. His lordship, however, seems to have had a 
shrewd suspicion, that his managed translation 
would not be suffered to pass altogether unnoticed. 
Hence, in the event of a detection, he attempts to 
secure his retreat by telling us, that, in the meta- 



102 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



physics of that age, Usia or Substance bore a 
sense different from that which we now annex to 
it : intimating, so far as I can understand his 
somewhat shuffling statement, that, in the third 
and fourth and fifth centuries, the word Substance 
was employed to denote, not the essential sub- 
stratum or the absolute actuality of a thing, but 
only those physical qualities which the school- 
men call accidents \ 

(1.) As favouring his projected exposition of 
Theodoret's Usia (which, by the way, makes 
strange wild work with his notable translation of 
the passage 2 ), the Bishop adduces Peter Chryso^ 
logus and Augustine and Tertullian. 

Tertullian, unless my memory altogether fail 
me, invariably uses the term Substance in the 
precise sense wherein most undoubtedly Theo- 
doret here uses it : and, in no passage, is this sense 
more palpable, than in that which the Bishop him- 
self has produced most indiscreetly, as favourable 
to his own criticism. 

. " Substance," says Tertullian, " is one thing : 
" the nature or quality of Substance is another. 
" Stone and iron are substances : their hardness 
" is the nature of their substance V 

1 Answer, p. 273, 274. 

2 According to his exposition of Theodoret's ovaia, his trans- 
lation will effectively run : They remain in the accidents of the 
former accidents. This inevitably follows, from his now con- 
tending, that ovmag and ff^r}fxa.TOQ and e'idovg all EQUALLY 
denote the accidents of the bread and wine. 

3 Tertull. de anim. cited in Answer, p. 274. 



CHAP. III.] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



103 



With Tertullian, we see, stone itself is the 
Substance or Vsia, in the self-evident meaning of 
Essential Substratum : and hardness is the acci- 
dent of the substance specified. 

In the same sense also, the word Substance 
is used by Chrysologus and Augustine, even as 
cited by the Bishop. Each speaks of a change, 
though not an entire change, produced in the es- 
sential substratum of the thing spoken of. 

I may add, that, still in the same sense of Es- 
sential Substratum, the word is employed by Ar- 
nobius, who nourished at the beginning of the 
fourth century. By the word substance he means 
the thing itself or the positive actuality of the 
thing, not its qualities or accidents \ 

The word nature, in the abstract, I allow to be 
ambiguous : but, that Theodoret uses it in the 
same sense as substance (that is to say, in the 
same sense as substance viewed as comprehending 
its oivn proper accidents), is manifest, both from 
the context, and likewise from the express com- 
bination of the two terms by Pope Gelasius, who, 
at the latter end of the same fifth century with 
Theodoret, wrote against the same Eutychian spe- 
culatists. " The substance or nature of the bread 

1 Itaque immemores et obliti simulachrorum substantia atque 
originis, quae sit. Arnob. adv. gent. lib. vi. p. 201. The sub- 
stantia was the aurum and ces and testula, which he had men- 
tioned immediately before. Quod enim non habet robur et 
substantiam corporalem, contrectari a substantia non potest 
corporali. Arnob. adv. gent. lib. vii. p. 234. 



104 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. III. 



" and wine/' says he, " ceases not to exist V Now 
the import of the term Substance, in the meta- 
physics of this age (as we shall abundantly see 
before we have done with the Bishop's criticism), 
is determined to be Essential Substratum or Ab- 
solute Actuality. The term Nature, therefore, 
as employed by Theodoret and Gelasius, will 
undoubtedly, in their hands, bear the same signi- 
fication. 

It may be added, that the real doctrine, main- 
tained by Theodoret and Gelasius through their 
use of the word Substance, is completely deter- 
mined by Facundus, who flourished not long after 
them in the sixth century, and who by fortunately 
employing no scholastic terms affords not any play 
to the Bishop's misapplied ingenuity. " Not," 
says he, " that the bread improperly Christ's body, 
" or that the wine is properly his blood ; but be- 
" cause they contain the mystery of his body and 
" blood within themselves. Hence it was, that 
" the consecrated bread and wine, which he deli- 
<( vered to his disciples, our Lord denominated 
" his own body and blood 2 " 

1 Et tamen esse non desinit substantia vel natura panis 
et vini. Gelas. de duab. Christ, nat. in Biblioth. Patr. vol. iv. 
p. 422. 

2 Non quod proprie corpus ejus sit panis, et poculum san- 
guis; sed quod in se mysterium corporis et sanguinis conti- 
neant. Hinc et ipse Dominus benedictum panem et calicem, 
quern discipulis tradidit, corpus et sanguinem suum vocavit. 
Facund. Defens. Concil. Chalced. lib. ix. c. 5. Oper.-p. 144. 

11 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



105 



(2.) Substance, asserts the Bishop, in the meta- 
physics of that age, denoted, not, as with us, the 
essential substratum of a thing, but merely its 
qualities or accidents. 

Most unfortunate was it for the Arians, that his 
lordship did not flourish in the controversial days 
of the Homousion. Those gentlemen have long 
been celebrated for their proficiency in the noble 
art of quibbling : yet even they were at length 
pinned down by the strictness of the declaration, 
that the Son was homdusian or consubstantial or 
of one usia or of one substance with the Father. 
They well knew, that usia or substance neither 
did nor could mean any thing else than essential 
substratum, any thing else than the very ipsissi- 
mum or (in their own language) the very autota- 
ton of the matter under discussion : and hence, as 
we are all aware, they rejected the Nicene Creed, 
the absolute hinge of which turns upon this pre- 
cise word usia or substance. But the valuable 
assistance of the Bishop of Strasbourg, armed to 
the teeth with the strangely overlooked metaphy- 
sics of their own age, would have speedily helped 
them out of all their difficulties : for his lordship 
would have taught them as he teaches me, that, by 
usia, we are no way bound to understand essential 
substratum, as the Arians ignorantly fancied, and 
as we still fancy in the nineteenth century ; but 
that, according to the familiar metaphysical lan- 
guage of that period, we may fairly interpret it to 
denote nothing more than accidents or qualities. 



106 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



You Arians, therefore, may safely subscribe, both 
to the Nicene Creed of the year 325, and to the 
Ecthesis adopted as their own by the Ephesian 
Fathers in the year 431 K It is true, indeed, that 
both the Creed and the Ecthesis turn entirely 
upon this same word usia : and it is quite clear, 
that, in each of these compositions, the sense de- 
signedly attached to the word is that of essential 
substratum. But this need not trouble you. I have 
an infallible nostrum ready prepared. Though 
you deny the Son to be of the same essential 
substratum as the Father : you allow him, as a 
secondary and created God, to possess the Father's 
proper accidents or qualities. 

Unluckily, however, the Bishop's projected in- 
terpretation of the word usia, upon the most ap- 
proved metaphysical principles of the fourth and 
fifth centuries, seems never once to have occurred 
to the less subtle Arians : in the science of exco- 
gitating verbal distinctions for the better evasion 
of the truth, they w T ere a mere type of his lord- 
ship of Strasbourg : and hence, consistently, they 

1 For an account of this Ecthesis, and for the Ecthesis itself, 
see Mr. Burton's Testim. of the Antenic. Fathers to the divin. of 
Christ, p. 397 — 400. Mr. Burton's Work is a beautiful and 
well nigh perfect specimen of that mode of successive historic 
demonstration, which the Bishop of Strasbourg professed to 
adopt on behalf of the peculiarities of the Latin Church, but 
which he only ought to have adopted. If he will read that gen- 
tleman's very able production, he will readily perceive the why 
and the wherefore of my pronouncing the Discussion Amicale 
to be a complete failure. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



107 



refused subscription to the consubstantiality of 
the Father and the Son. 

(3.) But why talk I of Tertullian and Arnobius 
and the Fathers of Nicea and Ephesus in the 
years 325 and 431 ? Theodoret himself, in the 
identical passage before the Bishop's very eyes 
and translated by his very hand, actually uses 
the precise word usia or substance in the neces- 
sary and indisputable sense of essential sub- 
stratum : nay more, he so uses it in direct and 
avowed corresponsive reference to the same word 
usia, as it occurs even in the next successive 
sentence where his lordship would persuade us 
that it denotes nothing more than accidents or 
qualities. 

" As then," says Eranistes, " the symbols of 
" the Lord's body and blood are one thing before 
" the sacerdotal invocation ; but, after the invo- 
" cation, are transmuted and become another 
" thing : so the Lord's body, after its assumption, 
" is transmuted into the divine substance V 

" You are caught in your own net," immedi- 
ately replies Orthodoxus. " For the mystical 
" symbols, after consecration, pass not out of their 
" own nature : for they remain in their former 
" substance 2 and shape and appearance." 

The false argument of the Eutychian is : that, 
As the bread and wine, in the asserted belief of 
the Catholic, pass out of their own substance into 



1 Gr. ovtriav. 



3 Gr. ohaidQ. 



108 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. III. 



the substance of Christ's body and blood ; so the 
human body of Christ, in the actual belief of the 
Eutychian, passes out of its own substance into 
the substance of the Deity. 

The reply of the Catholic is : that The mystic 
symbols do not pass out of, but remain in, their 
former substance ; and, therefore, that the true 
doctrine of the Eucharist affords no illustration 
of the crude conceit, that the human body of 
Christ passes out of its own substance into the 
divine substance. 

I venture to conclude, that the Bishop will not 
carry his ancient metaphysics so far as to assert, 
that usia, in the mouth of Eranistes, denotes only 
the accidents or qualities of the Deity. It would 
be pleasing, therefore, to hear from his lordship 
some satisfactory account, why usia, in the argu- 
ment of Eranistes, means one thing ; and why the 
self-same usia, in the avowed reply of Orthodoxus 
means quite another thing : why, in short, the 
first usia denotes essential substratum ; and yet 
why the second usia denotes accidents or qua- 
lities \ 

1 The Bishop, I observe, in his translation, which from its 
superior accuracy is designed to supersede my own, renders 
the first usia essence ; while the second usia he renders sub- 
stance. Answer, p. 270. 

In the abstract, I have no particular objection to the word 
essence, though both the Latin Fathers and ourselves ordinarily 
express the Greek ovcria by substance and the Greek bjxoovtnog 
by consubstantial : but the Bishop has so many doubles, that 
the suspicion of premeditated unfairness is inevitable. Did his 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



109 



3. But the Bishop, not content with mistransla- 
tion and perversion, is guilty also of suppression 
in his dealings with our unfortunate Theodoret. 
The prudence of this management, in a Work 
mainly designed for the eyes of our English or Irish 
Latins, is sufficiently clear : whether its fairness 
be equally manifest, is quite another question. 

Our Saviour," says the same speaker Ortho- 
doxus in the first Dialogue, " interchanged the 
" names : for to his body he gave the name of 
" the symbol, and to the symbol the name of his 
" blood. Thus, having called himself a vine, he 
a called the symbol blood 1 ." 

This passage, though adduced and fully com- 
mented upon by myself in immediate connection 

lordship, by this superfluous variation (to say the least of it), 
wish his readers, who either were no well-booted Grecians or 
who had no access to the writings of Theodoret, to conclude, 
that Eranistes and Orthodoxus used two different words ? Such 
a happy mistake would doubtless smooth the way for the recep- 
tion of the Bishop's metaphysical criticism. Though essence, 
in the mouth of Eranistes, clearly meant essential substratum : 
yet that could be no reason, why the quite different word sub- 
stance, in the mouth of Orthodoxus, should not denote qua- 
lities or accidents. Why did not his lordship translate the same 
Greek word ovala uniformly ? Why is it essence in the mouth 
of Eranistes, but substance in the mouth of Orthodoxus? 
Where confidence is gone, suspicion may perhaps unjustly 
arise : and I hope this may be the case in the present instance. 

1 Theod. Dial. i. Oper. vol. iv. p. 18. To prevent any pos- 
sible future quibbling on the part of the Bishop or his adhe- 
rents, I subjoin the original Greek of Theodoret. Ovtojq a/x7re- 
Xov eavrov ovofJidcraG, aifia to (tv/jl(3u\op Trpovnyoptvcrsv. 



110 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



with the other passage on which the Bishop has 
so profitably exercised his critical and metaphy- 
sical ingenuity, he has thought fit, in his avowed 
answer to my discussion, to suppress altogether : 
so that a person, who knew the Difficulties of 
Romanism only through the medium of his lord- 
ship's Answer, would never suspect that any such 
passage had been there cited in collateral and 
connected evidence K Had he suffered it to ap- 
pear in the Answer, his entire attempt to pervert 
the meaning of Theodoret's Orthodoxus would 
immediately have stood out, self-convicted of being 
wholly futile and abortive. 

" Christ, having called himself a vine, called 
" the symbol blood." 

Thus speaks the personified Orthodoxy of the 
fifth century : and the language is too plain to be 
either quibbled away or misunderstood. Ortho- 
doxus indisputably viewed the two expressions, 
/ am the vine and This is my blood, as homoge- 
neous : for he plainly intimates, that, for the pur- 
pose of preserving the decorum and congruity of 
the metaphor, Christ styled the symbolical wine 
his blood, because he had already denominated 
himself a vine. Blood is the juice of man : wine 
is the juice of the vine-tree. Hence, if Christ be 
allegorically a vine-tree ; wine, which is the juice 
of the vine-tree, will of course be allegorically his 
blood. 



1 See Diff. of Rom. p. 141—143. 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



Ill 



By the very nature and construction of the sen- 
tence (I appeal to the plain good sense of the in- 
telligent reader), it is impossible, but that Ortho- 
doxus must have used the terms homogeneously. 
Hence, according to the Orthodoxy of the fifth 
century, Christ denominated the symbolical wine 
his blood, in the self same sense wherein he de- 
nominated himself a vine: that is to say, his 
words, in the institution of the Eucharist, must be 
understood, as Augustine had already most justly 
determined on the soundest principles of criticism, 
not literally, but figuratively. 

Indeed, the very verbal phraseology of Theo- 
doret indisputably fixes his meaning. " Christ, 
" having called himself a vine, called the symbol 
" blood" With Theodoret, we see, the wine is a 
symbol, not a reality. As a symbol, it shadows 
out or represents or typifies the blood of Christ : 
just as the vine-tree, another kindred symbol, sha- 
dows out or represents or typifies Christ himself. 

The whole of this most important evidence, 
which at once determines the sense of the answer 
given by Orthodoxus to Eranistes, has been de- 
liberately suppressed by the Bishop. It is really 
painful to use such language to a Prelate of that 
part (however corrupt a part) of Christ's Catholic 
Church which is in communion with the provin- 
cial western Patriarch of Rome : but truth com- 
pels me to be severe in my diction, though under 
much insult I may preserve the equanimity of my 
temper. The Bishop, in his Discussion Amicale 



I 



112 SUPPLEMENT TO THE £CHAP. III. 

(never was there a more whimsical misnomer), 
has chosen to make an unprovoked attack upon 
another and purer part of the same Catholic 
Church, which is seated (esto perpetua !) in this 
independent realm of England: and, as he has 
repeated the attack in his recent Answer to my- 
self, he shall, at length, not be permitted to escape 
without well-merited chastisement \ 

1 I may here conveniently notice the well-nigh miraculous 
effrontery of Dr. Trevern in dealing with the ancient Liturgies. 

He says of them : " They all speak uniformly, and in ex- 
" pressions the most energetic, of our doctrines. All proclaim, 
" with one voice, the altar, the oblation, the unbloody sacrifice 
" of the new covenant, the real presence of the victim, the 
" change of substance, and, in fine, the adoration." Ans. 
p. 182. 

In proof of this assertion, he begins with referring to the very 
ancient liturgy and directory, contained in the eighth book of 
the Apostolical Constitutions and usually called the Clemen- 
tine Liturgy; which our own great Bishop Bull, with the gene- 
ral concurrence of the learned, pronounces to have been the 
form of worship observed in the Eastern Churches even before 
the time of Constantine. Ans. p. 200, 201. 

Now, will the reader believe it ? This earliest liturgy extant 
actually gives not any the slightest hint of an adoration of the 
elements : says not a syllable about any change of substance : 
and asserts nothing respecting the real presence of the victim ; 
words, which, as used by Dr. Trevern, indisputably mean the 
corporal presence of Christ under the aspect of being himself a 
sacrifice. It does indeed style the consecrated Elements this sa- 
crifice, tyiv dvffiav ravrnv : but, in what sense it so styles them, 
is abundantly clear, both from its immediately afterward deno- 
minating the metaphorical sacrifice in question the witness of 
the sufferings of the Lord Jesus } tov papTvpa ribv Tvadr^fxariov 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



113 



IV. Throughout the whole of his Answer, the 
Bishop repeatedly abuses me, with more zeal than 

rov Kvplov 'Ir)<rov, and from its subsequently describing it as the 
spiritual or figurative sacrifice which Christ offered to God be- 
fore his own passion, rrjv TcvevfxaTLK^v Ovariav Trpoatiepiov rw 
Qeo) avrov kcu Harpl irpb rov ttclQovq. Apos. Constit. lib. viii. 
c. 12. p. 407. c. 46. p. 427. Cotel. Patr. Apost. vol. i. 

The Bishop, by his Italics, would discover, I presume, the doc- 
trine of Trans ubstantiation in the words, oVwe aVo^tjvjj rbv dprov 

TOVTOV CWjUa TOV XpHTTOV (TOV, KOt TO "KOTl]piOV TOVTO CUfXa TOV 

XpiGTov arov : which he translates, that he may make this bread 
become the body of thy Christ, and this chalice his blood. Ans. 
p. 201. Now, if I admit the propriety of his translation, which 
I am in no wise bound to do as it is not the necessary version of 
the place : still how will his cause be improved ? The liturgy, 
we will say, speaks of a change of the bread and wine into the 
body and blood of Christ : but where does it speak of any change 
of substance ? This last is purely the coinage of the Bishop's 
own inventive brain. Similar language is used in the other litur- 
gies : and forthwith, though no change of substance is ever 
mentioned by any one of them, his lordship actively assumes 
(the very point which he had to prove J, that the change men- 
tioned in each case is transubstantiative. Yet, most assu- 
redly, as the liturgies themselves give him no right to make any 
such assumption ; so the full explanation of the liturgical lan- 
guage by Orthodoxus in Theodoret directly prohibits him : for, 
though, by a moral change and in the legitimate sense of the 
words, the bread and wine become through consecration the body 
and blood of Christ ; yet, as he expressly and unequivocally as- 
sures us, they still remain in their former substance. 

To the other liturgies, cited by the Bishop, I have no access : 
I must, therefore, take his extracts from them on his own credit. 
Now, even by his shewing, which we may be quite sure will not 
be unfavourable to his cause, not a single instance do they con- 
tain of any adoration of the Elements. Adoration is, indeed, 

I 



114 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE £CHAP. IIL 



wisdom, because, on very full evidence, I have as- 
serted, that, however rhetorical their language 

frequently mentioned : but of what ? Certainly not of the Ele- 
ments. Respecting any adoration of them, the liturgies, at least 
as cited by the Bishop, say not a word : and, since nothing of 
the sort is adduced, I feel certain that his lordship found nothing 
definite. The priest and the deacon and the people adore, it is 
true : but, so far as appears from the Bishop's own citations, 
they adore, not the unconscious Elements, but the living God. 
See Ans, p. 209, 212, 213, 219, 225. 

I have not yet, however, quite done with the Clementine Li- 
turgy. It may be useful to mention two other matters. 

The prayer-books of the modern Romanists are stuffed full 
of invocations to the saints, in order, according to the lowest 
sense, that these saints would intercede for them at the throne 
of grace : and the Bishop defends this practice, on the avowed 
ground, that it was the practice of primitive antiquity. Yet, 
from beginning to end, through the whole Clementine Liturgy 
and Directory, not a trace is there of any invocation of the saints 
upon any pretence. His lordship has thought it prudent alto- 
gether to suppress this circumstance. 

Prayers for the dead the Clementine Liturgy admits, that God 
would pardon their sins voluntary and involuntary, and would 
receive them into the region of the pious ; an innovation upon 
the ancient commemoration and thanksgiving, which I never 
denied to be earlier than the time of Constantine, and which 
not improbably was built upon a misapprehension of Rev. vi. 
9 — 1 1 : but not a word does it say about any Purgatory, as if 
the prayers were designed to extricate the souls of the departed 
from that place of temporary suffering. On the contrary, it holds 
language which is directly opposed to any such speculation : for 
it expressly states, that no torment shall touch the spirits of the 
just. Hdvrtov at ^X 9 ' ^"l ** ooi £u>ari, /cat rwv BtKatwy ra 
7rv£v/xara kv tt} X El P l aov EL(Tlv i ov o-^rjrai fidaavoQ' 
7raVre£ yap j/ytaoy^eVoi vko rag ^elpa'e aov elaiv, Constit. Apos. 



CHAP. 111.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 115 

may occasionally be, the early ecclesiastics ac- 
knowledged no change in the consecrated ele- 
ments save a moral change only. 

This we have seen to be the case with Theo- 
doret even so late as the fifth century. Contro- 
versy alone produces strict precision of language. 
When the Eutychian, evidently building upon the 
rhetorical phraseology which was then commonly 
employed and from which the Romanists are wont 
to extract their pretended proofs of the early 
reception of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, 
framed his argumentum ad hominem, charging 
this precise doctrine upon the Catholic Church : 
the Orthodoxy of the age instantly repelled the 
allegation, with a distinct avowal that the conse- 

lib. viii. c. 41. p. 423. The attentive reader will not fail to ob- 
serve the emphatic ov /xri. 

In my treatment of the Bishop, I shewed a degree of for- 
bearance, unexampled, I believe, in the annals of controversy. 
Throughout my Difficulties of Romanism, partly from a good- 
natured unwillingness to hurt his feelings, and partly from a de- 
cent habit of respectful veneration for his office, I mercifully and 
systematically refrained from exposing him a single iota more 
than I found absolutely necessary. In return for this perhaps 
unwise gentleness, he raises the shout of triumph on the plea, 
that I have but little noticed his worse than silly argument from 
the liturgies ; tells me, that my weak eyes were dazzled by the 
brilliancy of those compositions ; and loudly dares to the combat 
his supposed shrinking antagonist. Thus recklessly, in the vain 
pride of his high speculations, has he courted exposure: and 
thus justly has he received it fully, though tardily. His own 
infatuation has constrained me : / myself wished to have spared 
him ; / myself was reluctant. 

I 2 



116 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



crated elements, however in a legitimate sense 
they may be said to become and to be the body 
and blood of Christ, nevertheless pass not out of 
their own proper nature, but remain in their 
former substance. 

Such an avowal answers to the explanatory lan- 
guage perpetually used by the ancient Fathers. 
Would any man in his senses, who believed the 
doctrine of Transubstantiation, ever dream of com- 
paring the change, which by consecration takes 
place in the symbolical Elements, to the change 
which takes place in a human individual when by 
consecration he is transmuted from a layman into 
a clergyman ? Would the Bishop of Strasbourg, 
for instance, in the present day, venture upon so 
extraordinary an illustrative comparison ? Yet 
this comparison, with sundry others of an exactly 
similar nature, has not been maliciously instituted 
by the heretical Rector of Long-Newton : it is the 
genuine and undoubted property of good Gregory 
of Nyssa, who flourished in the fourth century. 
Nor is Gregory any way singular. If Cyril of Je- 
rusalem and Ireneus and the ancient Homilist in 
Jerome choose, with much harmony, to draw the 
very same sort of comparisons : is the Rector of 
Long-Newton, on that account, to be reviled and 
abused and calumniated by the Bishop of Stras- 
bourg ? His lordship's wrath, I allow, is suffi- 
ciently impotent : but why am / to be subjected 
to foul language for the misdemeanours of worthy 
Gregory and his colleagues ? In abuse, the Bishop 



CHAP. III>3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



117 



is a perfect adept : but, with respect to the as- 
serted doctrine of a moral change as exclusively 
held by the early Church, he has not even so much 
as attempted a confutation. Above the mighty 
torrent of his indignation, like the friendly Eddi- 
stone above the troubled waves of the ocean, we 
still discern the heads of ancient Gregory and his 
associates. Why did not the Bishop set aside my 
evidence ? Simply, because he could not. His 
rage is merely the rage of an animal unable to ex- 
tricate itself from the toils of the hunter. 

V. So, likewise, why says the Bishop not a single 
word respecting the positive attestation of Raban 
of Mentz ; when, in the ninth century, Paschase of 
Corby first reduced the floating elements of Tran- 
substantiation into a compact and well-arranged 
system ? 

It were a small matter, in point of evidence, 
that the good Archbishop had merely rejected the 
doctrine because he thought it contrary to Scrip- 
ture. But this is not the case. He rejects it on 
the avowed ground, that, even so late as the ninth 
century, it was still a novelty in the West, main- 
tained only by a feiv speculative innovators, and 
opposed by himself in conjunction with the inevi- 
tably implied majority. 

f*. Some persons, of late, not entertaining a 
" sound opinion respecting the sacrament of the 
" body and blood of our Lord, have ventured to 
" declare, that this is the identical body and blood 
" of our Lord Jesus Christ ; the identical body to 



118 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. III. 



" wit, which was born of the Virgin Mary, in which 
" Christ suffered upon the cross, and in which he 
" rose from the dead. This error we have op- 

tf POSED WITH ALL OUR MIGHT 1 ." 

In this passage there is no room for quibbling, 
as the Bishop has quibbled on the parallel passage 
in Augustine : we know what opinions Raban was 
opposing ; and therefore we know the true mean- 
ing of his language. Now T the question between 
the Bishop and myself, be it remembered, is not 
abstractedly Whether the doctrine of Transub- 
stantiation be true or false, but concretely Whe- 
ther that doctrine was or was not held in the early 
Church, and thence Whether it was or was not 
taught by Christ and his Apostles. Here, then, 
we have a direct testimony bearing full upon the 
question before us. I cite Raban merely in evi- 
dence to a fact. From him we learn, that, in the 
Western or Latin Church and in the ninth cen- 
tury, some persons, not many persons or all per- 
sons, entertained that unsound doctrine which has 
since been called Transubstantiation ; that they 
had taken up this doctrine of late, having by no 
means received it from primitive antiquity ; and 
that he, the Archbishop, firmly holding with the 
great body of the faithful, had opposed this novel, 
though as yet very partially received, error with 
all his might. 

Whether Raban was right or wrong in what he 

1 Raban. Maur. Epist. ad Heribald. c. xxxiii* 



CHAP. Ill/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



119 



did, is nothing to the purpose. I cite him only in 
evidence to a fact. With him I mentioned also, 
as taking the same side of the argument as him- 
self against the alleged novelty of Paschase, Heri- 
bald of Auxerre, Amalar of Triers, Bertram of 
Corby, Walafrid Strabo, Christian Druthmar, Dre- 
panius Florus, and John Duns Erigena 1 . 

1 See my DifT. of Rom. p. 149 — 153. Bishop Cosins, whose 
Work I had not read when I published my Difficulties of i?o- 
manism, and for the possession of which I have since been in- 
debted to the kindness of the very learned Dr. Routh President 
of Magdalen College Oxford, inclines to think, that even Pas- 
chase of Corby was not a transubstantialist : and he certainly 
adduces many remarkable passages from his writings, which 
might seem to favour such an opinion. But the circumstance 
of the actual soundness of Paschase, though his unguarded 
language might have been misunderstood by his contemporaries, 
so far from weakening my evidence, will in truth strengthen it. 
On Bishop Cosins's supposition of the real doctrinal soundness 
of Paschase, we shall observe, that the very abearance of the 
dogma of Transubstantiation immediately, in the ninth century, 
called for the strenuous opposition and marked censure of Raban 
and his fellows. Now this would have been impossible, had 
Transubstantiation been the universally received doctrine of the 
Church at that period, and had it been catholically recognised 
as the doctrine undoubtedly taught from the very beginning by 
Christ and his Apostles. See Cosin. Histor. Transub. Papal, 
c. v. § 29. p. 86 — 89. One of the expressions of Paschase is : 
Non carnaliter caro et sanguis Christi percipiuntur, sed spiri- 
tualiter. On the plea of such language, Bishop Cosins thinks, 
that the tale, respecting the visible appearance of Christ in the 
Eucharist under the form of an infant and of a finger of raw 
flesh, has been interpolated into the Work of Paschase : and it 
must be admitted, that the tale and the language do not seem to 



120 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. III. 



Now why has the Bishop, in his professed An- 
swer, totally pretermitted the whole of this over- 
whelming evidence ? While he is loosely copious 
in long rambling citations, which bear not upon 
the point at issue, and which can never settle the 
matter in debate : why is he so ominously taci- 
turn, upon what, in respect of historical testi- 
mony, is part and parcel of the very pith and mar- 
row of the argument ? Why does he not account 
to his expectant readers for the fully established 
fact, that, in the ninth century, the doctrine of 
Transubstantiation, in despite of John Damascene 
and the second Council of Nice, was still, among 
the less refining Latins, a novelty, but lately ad- 
vanced by some speculative men, and opposed by 
the great lights of the age in perfect harmony with 
the majority of the faithful 1 ? 

harmonise very well together. Whether the Bishop of Stras- 
bourg will take up the cudgels for the genuineness of the tale 
against his learned defunct brother of Durham, I pretend not to 
conjecture. Non meum est tantas componere lites. 

1 The second Council of Nice sat in the year 787 : Raban 
flourished about the year 825. The discoveries of the theo- 
pneust Fathers and of John Damascene were only just beginning 
to germinate in the West, where they seem to have been by no 
means cordially welcomed. Amalar, as cited by Bishop Cosins, 
writes : Secundum quendam modum, sacramentum corporis 
Christi corpus Ckristi est. Si enim sacramenta quandam si- 
militudinem earum rerum y quarum sacramenta sunt, non liabe- 
renty omnino sacramenta non essent : ex hac autem similitudine 
pier umque jam ipsarum rerum nomina accipiunt. And again : 
Sacramenta ad hoc valent, ut nos perducant ad ipsas res, qua- 



CHAP. III.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



121 



The reason is evident. His lordship had nothing 
to say on the subject : and therefore, hoping that 
many of at least his Romish readers would never 
detect the omission, he very wisely held his tongue. 

VI. Complete and decisive as we find histori- 
cal testimony to be against the Latin doctrine of 
Transubstantiation, we must not forget, that that 
very extraordinary doctrine is equally contradicted 
by Scripture. 

The Bishop vainly labours to refit his case from 
Capernaum, which in my Difficulties of Romanism 
I had most effectually demolished. To go over 
the ground a second time, when nothing new is 
adduced by his lordship, I deem quite useless. 

My other arguments from Scripture the Bishop 
thinks it adviseable to pretermit. One of them 
I shall briefly restate by way of a suitable conclu- 
sion. 

Tradition, which does not contradict Scripture, 
may, peradventure, at least be tolerated. Under 
such a negative aspect, it is a sort of milk-and- 
water composition : which, if it does no good, can- 
not do much harm, beyond perhaps the consump- 
tion of time which might be more profitably em- 

rum sunt sacramenta. Cosin. Hist. Trans. Pap. c. v. § 30. p. 
90. We shall not easily find a better explanation of the lan- 
guage of Cyril in the Catechesis which has already been fully 
discussed. I may add, that this is the true key to those various 
passages in the early Fathers, which the Romanists are so fond of 
adducing in proof of their favourite doctrine, but which in truth 
are quite beside the mark. 



122 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. III. 



ployed. But, when it contradicts Scripture, it 
forthwith becomes an absolute nuisance and an 
impious abomination. Now such precisely is the 
Bishop's darling tradition, in regard to the doc- 
trine at present before us : a tradition, by the 
way, which requires more patchwork, than his 
lordship's ingenuity can furnish out, to make it 
reach the primitive ages. Such however as it is, 
it teaches him, that the literal glorified body and 
blood of Christ are offered up to the Father, as a 
true and proper expiatory sacrifice for the quick 
and for the dead, whensoever it shall please a little 
sacerdotal Latin homuncio to celebrate the Eu- 
charist : it teaches him, therefore, that Christ is 
often offered. But both St. Peter and St. Paul 
positively assure us, in the word of inspiration, as 
if in bitter anticipating mockery of the Bishop's 
infallible tradition, that Christ was offered only 
once K In the common acceptation of all lan- 
guages with which I happen to be acquainted, once 
and often are irreconcileable enemies. Under 
such circumstances, therefore, sinful heretic as I 
am, I trust that I am guilty of no very violent im- 
piety in preferring the authoritative decision of 
the two blessed Apostles to the authoritative con- 
tradiction of it propounded by their pretended 
successor and representative in the western See 
of Rome. 

1 1 Pet. iii. 18. Heb. ix. 28. x. 10. 



CHAP. IVj DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



123 



CHAPTER IV. 

MISCELLANEOUS. 

At this point of the discussion, I invite any person, 
who has perused what the Bishop and myself 
have written on opposite sides of the question, to 
recollect his lordship's promise and to ponder se- 
riously upon its performance. 

His promise was, that, on adequate historical 
testimony, he would demonstrate the various doc- 
trines or practices of Transubstantiation, Pur- 
gatory, Prayers for the dead in Purgatory, In- 
fallibility, Indulgences, Image-worship, Saint- 
worship, Relic-worship, Cross-worship, and the 
like, to have been revealed or instituted by Christ 
and his Apostles. 

With respect to his performance of this promise, 
as exhibited in his Discussion Amicale and in his 
Answer to myself, I will venture without the least 
hesitation to assert, that not even the most cre- 
dulous historian, if writing from existing docu- 
ments a faithful account of the transactions of our 
Lord and his Apostles, would ever dream of ascrib- 
ing such matters to their teaching, on the miser- 
ably insufficient evidence produced by the Bishop. 

This I should say, on a mere inspection of his 
lordship's Works, and even if I had not written a 
9 



124 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. IV. 



single line of disproval : yet, unless these matters 
rest upon the infallible authority of Christ and his 
Apostles, they are plainly nothing more than 
mere gratuitous figments of presumptuous men, all 
equally concocted during periods later than that 
in the course of which the Apostles flourished. 

What the Bishop, however, so lamentably wants 
in evidence (and be it never forgotten, that the 
onus probandi rests with him), he superabun- 
dantly makes up, if that will satisfy an English 
jury, in undaunted assertion. Thus, tow T ard the 
close of his Answer, he gravely reminds our com- 
mon laic friend, to whom that production is spe- 
cially addressed, how he (our friend to wit) has 
seen, that the practice of praying the dead out of 
Purgatory " is built upon the teaching of the Apos- 
i e ties, and consequently upon that of their Divine 
" Master V If Mr. Massingberd will inform me, 
in what part of the Bishop's Work or Works he 
has seen this extraordinary portent ; for, like the 
young beauty in Terence, If there, such a flos- 
culus cannot be long concealed : I shall feel my- 
self most infinitely obliged to him. Una hcec spes 
est : ubi ubl est, diu celari non potest. So far, 
however, as I can judge from the evidence at pre- 
sent before me, the demonstration of the very re- 
markable historic fact, that prayers for the dead, 
as now offered up by the Romanists for the pious 
purpose of extracting their departed friends out 



1 Answer, p. 406. 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



125 



of Purgatory, were originally instituted by the 
Apostles on the authority of their Divine Master, 
is still a desideratum in dogmatical Theology. 

The remainder of the Bishop's Answer, which 
(according to his arrangement) occupies the third 
part of that Work, needs very little reply. It is 
chiefly taken up in gross and angry abuse of stout 
Queen Elizabeth, my humble self, the schisma- 
tical Church of England, and the vile continental 
reformers : a line of argument, which incontro- 
vertibly proves that his lordship has lost his tem- 
per, but which (so far as I can see) has no ten- 
dency to demonstrate that Christ and his Apos- 
tles instituted Image-worship or Saint-worship. 
Such indecent virulence is, in truth, no less im- 
politic than indecorous. It serves only to ex- 
hibit a possibly well-meaning, but a certainly 
very incompetent, individual, writhing under the 
blows which have crushed him to the dust : blows, 
in the first instance, administered by me (as some 
have thought) with perhaps even a sickly tender- 
ness for his lordship's feelings ; yet blows, which 
he himself provoked by his wanton attack upon 
the Church of England and by his insulting chal- 
lenge to the whole body of her Clergy. At the 
instance of a valuable layman of that Church, and 
by no officious choice of my own, that challenge 
has been accepted : and the little ebullition of 
small pettishness, with which Dr. Trevern pro- 
fesses his resolution to withdraw from a contest 
sought only by himself, will not improbably con- 



126 SUPPLEMENT TO THE £cHAP. IV. 



jure up a smile upon the rigid countenance of the 
veteran controversialist. 

" How much/ he piteously exclaims, " has my 
" patience been tried ! The whole task appeared 
" to me ungrateful and revolting. I have endured 
" it once, disgusting as it was : but I could not 
" support it a second time. And I declare before 
" hand, that, let him write henceforth what he 
" pleases, I shall not read a line of his produc- 
tion 1 ." 

Tt 7TOTE fiefiqicev, i/7r' dypiag 

Avirrjg d't^aQt 6$ dvrjp ; Sedoix, oirwg 

M?) *jc rrjg fft(*)7rfjg Tfjg c)' dvappriZy /cam. 

Both my original Work and my present Reply 
being written with a special reference to the Eng- 
lish Laity, whom the Bishop would proselyte 
through the medium of reviling and calumniating 
their national Church ; provided only they are my 
readers, it will be a matter of very small conse- 
quence whether Dr. Trevern himself honours with 
his perusal my rural lucubrations. 

I. The Bishop angrily complains, that I have 
misrepresented him, when I describe him as main- 
taining Transubstantiation to be the exclusive se- 
cret of the Mysteries : and he now is pleased to 
intimate, that he knew well, that, at the same 
time also, this " secret discipline concealed from 
" the Pagans the mysteries of the Trinity and the 
" Incarnation 2 ." 



1 Answer, p. 454. 



2 Answer, p. 342. 



CHAP. IV/] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



127 



If I have misrepresented his lordship, I can 
only say that I have really done it quite inno- 
cently and undesignedly. I wrote, as I under- 
stood him. Neither in his original Work, nor yet 
in the prolonged repetition which occupies so 
large a portion of his present Work 1 , does he 
ever give the slightest hint, that the doctrine of 
the Holy Trinity was even one of the secrets of 
the Mysteries ; still less that it was so eminently 
their secret as to be exclusively mentioned by Je- 
rome in all the majesty of undivided solitude 2 : 
and I feel perfectly assured, that the impression 
left upon the mind of any one of his readers, like 
the impression most undoubtedly left upon my 
own mind, will be, that, in the theory of the 
Bishop, the Mysteries themselves were instituted 
for the special and determinate purpose of con- 

1 Answer, p. 138 — 180. At the beginning of this long repe- 
tition, indeed, he denies, that he ever insisted that the Eucha- 
rist was the sole or exclusive or even principal object of the 
Mysteries : but still not a word can he afford to throw away 
upon what was really their principal object ; so principal, that 
it is even mentioned by the ancients as being in a manner their 
only secret, and that it alone is ridiculed in the Philopatris 
under that precise aspect. 

2 Consuetudo autem apud nos istiusmodi est, ut iis, qui bap- 
tizandi sunt, per quadraginta dies, publice^tradamus sanctam 
et adorandam Trinitatem. Hieron. Epist. Ixi. ad Pammach. 
c. 4. Oper. vol. i. p. 180. Hence Firmilian, when speaking of 
a baptised Mysta, describes him as a person, cui nec symbolum 
Trinitatis, nec interrogatio legitima et ecclesiastica, defuit. Fir- 
mil, ad Cyprian. Epist. lxxv. Oper. Cyprian, vol. ii. p. 223. 



128 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE £CHAP. IV. 



cealing from the profane and of communicating 
to the fully illuminated faithful the precise and 
very extraordinary secret of Transubstantiation. 
Why did not the Bishop say, that that singular 
doctrine was only one of the matters concealed in 
the Mysteries ? Three lines would have sufficed : 
which would have been no very burdensome ad- 
dition to a Work, characteristically diffuse and 
declamatory. He has no right insultingly to 
charge misrepresentation upon his opponent, when 
the real fault is his own want of precision. 

His complaint, however, affects not my discus- 
sion even in the very slightest degree : for I ex- 
pressly go to prove (and, in the present short 
treatise, by a more full examination I have com- 
pleted my proof), that Transubstantiation was 
not only not the exclusive secret of the Mysteries 
(as I understood the Bishop to maintain), but that 
it was not even one secret out of many. 

Since I have become more intimately acquainted 
with his lordship's manifold evolutions, I have 
no scruple in expressing my own full belief, that, 
while he secured to himself a retreat in case of 
need, he wished and intended to leave it im- 
pressed upon the mind of his readers, that the 
Mysteries were instituted for the special purpose 
of concealing from the profane the doctrine of 
Transubstantiation, and in short that without that 
obj ect they never would have been instituted. This 
is the evident burden of his song in the Discus- 
sion Amicale : and so inveterate is habit, that it 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



129 



still involuntarily displays itself even in the repe- 
tition contained in the Answer to myself 1 . His 
lordship is copious upon the fancied reluctance 
of the Christians to reveal their pretended secret 
of Transubstantiation : but not a syllable does he 
say, respecting the facility with which they com- 
municated, even to the profane Pagans (when 
the good of the Church required it), their real 
secrets of the Trinity and Christ's godhead and 
incarnation. Again and again and again he tells 
us, that they would suffer death rather than re- 
veal the awful secret which the Mysteries required 
them to conceal: and yet they make not the 
least scruple of revealing even to Pagans, what 
he is now constrained to acknowledge as the 
grand secret of the Mysteries, the doctrine of the 
Holy Trinity 2 . Clearly they never betrayed the 

1 See Answer, p. 138— 180. 

2 This reluctant and tardy acknowledgment I gather from 
the querulous opening of his repetition of what he denominates 
the discipline of the secret. 

" I now pass on to the general proof which I extracted from 
" the discipline of the secret : not, however, that I ever insisted 
" that the Eucharist was its sole, exclusive^ or even principal 
" object." Answer, p. 138. 

If Transubstantiation were not the principal secret of the 
Mysteries, what was ? The Bishop knew from the first, as 
well as I do, that that principal secret was the doctrine of 
the Trinity : but it did not suit his purpose to enlighten his 
readers. In his lordship's hypothesis, the early Christians were 
quite horrified at the idea of revealing the inferior and secon- 
dary secret of Transubstantiation : but they made no difficulty 
in revealing the palmary and principal secret of the Trinity. 

K 



130 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE [CHAP. IV. 



secret of Transubstantiation, for the very best 
possible reason : in good sooth, they had no such 
secret to betray. 

II. The Bishop again tries to establish the 
rickety speculation of Purgatory : but, as he can 
make out no case for it, so he very prudently re- 
frains from noticing my evidence against it. 

Does the Bishop venture to deny this last matter 1 If he does, 
I recommend to his diligent attention the first Apology of Justin 
Martyr and the Legation of Athenagoras. He will there find 
two of the earliest Fathers, when the good of the Church re- 
quired it, unscrupulously propounding to the pagan Emperors 
and the Roman Senate the grand secret of the Holy Trinity ; 
which, in the discipline of the secret (as the Bishop calls it), 
was not propounded even to Christian Catechumens until they 
were upon the very eve of baptism. Nay I may add, that, even 
through the whole of an ordinary theological discussion with 
the unbaptised Jew Trypho and his friends, Justin again and 
again asserts the doctrine of Christ's divinity ; maintaining, that 
he was the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and that he 
was the person who under the economical title of the Messenger 
of Jehovah so repeatedly appeared to and was worshipped by 
the early patriarchs. In thus declaring one of the acknow- 
ledged secrets of the Mysteries to an unbaptised and hostile 
Jew, he was not deterred by any fear of profane ridicule on the 
part of his opponent ; which, accordingly, Trypho did not spare. 
Why, then, should he, or the other primitive Christians, have 
had a greater dread of revealing the secret of Transubstantia- 
tion, if they ever possessed it ? Will the Bishop pretend to say, 
that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is a greater and more 
awful secret than the doctrine of Christ's godhead or than the 
doctrine of the Trinity ? If he does, he will contradict himself : 
for he now confesses, that the doctrine of Transubstantiation 
was not the principal object of the Mysteries. 
8 



CHAP. IV.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 131 

On the principle, that the modern Latin doc- 
trine of Purgatory was taught by Christ and 
his Apostles, let him, if he can, account for the 
hesitating vacillation of Augustine and for that 
Father's final adoption (if he ever really adopted 
it) of a Purgatory altogether irreconcileable with 
the Bishop's Purgatory. 

According to the Bishop, souls are now at this 
present moment in an already existing Purga- 
tory, out of which they may be liberated by the 
hired prayers of the Roman Clergy and by what 
he calls the sacrifice of the Mass for both quick 
and dead : but, according to Augustine, if he 
ever made up his mind on the subject, there is 
neither such a place nor such a thing as Purga- 
tory at present ; but the flames, which will here- 
after wrap an expiring world, will, at some future 
period, operate as a Purgatory upon those whose 
souls may need purgation K 

Yet, with this unanswered testimony staring 
him in the face (even to say nothing of my other 
equally unanswered testimonies), would the Bi- 
shop gravely persuade us, that the modern Latin 
Purgatory with its whole outfit, though quite un- 
known to Augustine and the doctors of the fourth 
age, was revealed by Christ and his Apostles : 
when, all the while, throughout the entire volume 
of the New Testament, not a syllable do Christ 
and his Apostles ever once say upon the subject, 



1 See Diff. of Rom. p. 208—213. 
K 2 



132 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. IV. 



Truly his lordship requires from his English pro- 
selytes a most marvellous and surpassing alacrity 
of belief. 

III. The second Council of Lateran had de- 
scribed the marriage of priests as no better than 
chambering and wantonness. 

Notwithstanding this infallible decision, the 
Bishop inclines to let the English Clergy keep 
their wives, provided only they will dutifully sub- 
mit themselves to Rome, and swallow all those 
peculiarities of doctrine and practice which (if we 
may believe his lordship) were originally incul- 
cated by Christ and his Apostles. This permis- 
sion being graciously accorded, he then, by way 
of shewing that the Lateran Fathers were, after 
all, quite right in their estimate of sacerdotal 
marriages, proceeds, with equal consistency of 
conduct and originality of interpretation, to vin- 
dicate the notable decision of the said Fathers, 
by the inspired authority of the text in the Apo- 
calypse, which describes the faithful followers of 
the Lamb as those who were not defiled with 
women, for they are virgins K If the followers of 
the Lamb consist exclusively of the unmarried, 
which the Bishop's extraordinary argument plainly 
requires : I tremble for the fate of the married 
Latin Laity. But, to speak with all due gravity, 
is it possible, that Dr. Trevern never heard of 
such a thing as spiritual fornication, the constant 
scriptural image of idolatry ? 

1 Rev. xiv. 4. 



CHAP. DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



133 



In cases of conscience, the Bishop is truly a 
most admirable casuist. It has been said, that the 
Reformation permitted the Clergy to marry, but 
deprived them of the means of keeping their 
wives. The Bishop, de speciali gratia, will allow 
them to keep their wives : but then he distinctly 
proves from Holy Writ, that such sacerdotal ap- 
pendages are an utter abomination. 

IV. To go over again the defence of the An- 
glican Church from the ribald abuse of Romish 
bigotry, I deem quite superfluous. So far as I 
can now understand Dr. Trevern (for he pos- 
sesses the useful faculty of not always expressing 
himself very clearly), he admits, that consecration 
gives the indelible episcopal character : but he 
contends, that mission alone imparts jurisdiction, 
which by schism (like the horrible schism of us 
stubborn English) is lost or forfeited \ 

A mere flat denial of the Pope's exclusive right 
in this particular may perhaps be thought of no 
great weight in the mouth of an Anglican divine, 
though the first Council of Nice placed all the 
then four existing Patriarchs upon a perfect equa- 
lity in point of jurisdiction, and although Pope 
Gregory the great vehemently reprobated any as- 
sumption of superiority on the part of any one 
Patriarch over the others 2 . If, however, the 

1 Answer, p. 419. 

2 Consacerdos meus Joannes vocari Universalis Episcopus 
conatur. Exclamare compellor ac dicere : O tempora ! O mo- 
res ! Sacerdotes vanitatis sibi nomina expetunt, et novis ac pro- 



134 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. IV. 



Bishop of Strasbourg regards neither Pope Gre- 
gory, nor the Nicene Fathers, nor (though last, 
not least) the redoubtable Rector of Long-New- 
ton, let him hear the dispassionate statement of 
the learned Fleury, himself a distinguished mem- 
ber of the Latin Church. Speaking of the con- 
version of the Germans by Boniface, in the eighth 
century, he remarks as follows. 

" They, who undertook the labour of this 
u ministry, always received a mission from the 
" Pope : though, in the earliest times, every Bishop 
" thought himself privileged to preach to his neigh- 
" bouring infidels. But it is to be supposed, that, 
" in the later ages, the Pope's appointment might 
" be necessary to remove diverse obstacles V 

phanis vocabulis gloriantur — Absit a cordibus Christianorum 
nomen Mud blasphemies, in quo omnium sacerdotum honor 
adimitur, dum ab uno sibi dementer arrogatur. Gregor. Epist. 
lib. iv. epis. 32. 

Nullus unquam decessorum meorum hoc tarn prophano voca- 
bulo uti consensit : quia, videlicet, si unus Patriarcha Univer- 
salis dicitur, Patriarcharum nomen cseteris derogatur. Sed 
absit, hoc absit, a Christiana mente, id sibi velle quenquam 
arripere, unde fratrum suorum honorem imminuere ex quantu- 
lacunque parte videatur. Gregor. Epist. lib. iv. epist. 36. 

They managed these things better at Rome during the mid- 
dle ages : and Dr. Trevern piously hopes to behold the beatific 
vision of papal supremacy once more established in our refrac- 
tory British islands ; a hope, devoutly reechoed by every en- 
lightened friend of liberty and popery throughout his majesty's 
three kingdoms. 

1 Fleury's Disc, on Eccles. Hist. fromA.D. 600toA.D. 1100. 
transl. in Jortin's Remarks on Eccles. Hist. vol. iii. p. 200. 



CHAP. IV.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



135 



If the primitive Bishops thought it no way 
necessary to have a mission from the Roman or 

It may not be useless or unentertaining to give in Fleury's 
own words the heads of the various papal usurpations ; which, 
as he justly remarks, were built up, in ages of laic ignorance, 
upon the impudent forgery of the Decretals. 

" I have already spoken of the false Decretals ascribed to the 
" Popes of the three first ages, which are found in the collec- 
" tion of Tsidorus, and which made their appearance at the end 
" of the eighth century : and I have mentioned the proofs, 
" which demonstrate them to be spurious. Here is the source of 
" all the evil : an ignorance of history and criticism caused these 
" Decretals to be received, and the new maxims contained in 
" them to be admitted as the doctrine of the purest antiquity— 

I. " In these false Decretals, it is declared unlawful to hold 
" a Council, without the order, or at least the permission, of the 
" Pope. Have you seen any thing like this in the history, I 
" say not of the three first ages of Christianity, but down to the 
" ninth ?— 

II. " In the Decretals it is said, that the Bishops can be 
" judged definitively by the Pope alone : and this maxim is fre- 
" quently repeated. You have met with an hundred instances 
" to the contrary — 

III. " The Decretals have also ascribed to the Pope alone the 
" power of translating Bishops from one See to another. Yet 
" the Council of Sardica and other Councils, which have most 
" strictly forbidden all translations, have made no exceptions in 
" favour of the Pope — 

IV. " The same may be observed concerning the erection of 
" new Sees. According to the Decretals, this belongs to the 
f Pope alone : but, according to the ancient discipline, it be- 
" longed to the council of the Province ; and there is an express 
" canon for it in the African Councils — ■ 

V. " As to the consolidation or suppression of Bishoprics, I 
" see no other grounds to attribute them to the Pope alone, ex- 



136 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. IV. 



W estern Patriarch, I trust that our English Bishops 
will not suffer very severely from the want of it. 

" cept some procedures of St. Gregory reported by Gratian. 
" But Gratian did not discern, that Gregory acted thus, only in 
" the southern parts of Italy of which Rome was the metropolis, 
" or in Sicily and other islands which depended particularly on 
" the Holy See— 

VI. " One of the deepest wounds, that the Decretals gave to 
" ecclesiastical discipline, was the boundless extending of the 
" appeals to the Pope. It appears, that the forger had this article 
" greatly at heart, by the care that he hath taken to spread quite 
" through his Work the maxim, that Not only every Bishop, 
" but every Priest, and in general every person, who Jinds him- 
" self aggrieved, may upon every occasion appeal directly to 
(t the Pope— -Yet St. Cyprian, who lived in the time of Fabian 
" and Cornelius, not only opposed such appeals, but gave solid 
" reasons for his opposition : and, in the time of St. Augustine, 
" the African Church did not as yet permit them, as it appears 
" from a letter of a Council to Pope Celestine — But, after the 
" Decretals got into vogue, appeals were perpetual throughout 
" the Latin Church — 

VII. " I see plainly, that, by thus extending the authority of 
" the Pope, they thought to procure him signal advantages and 
" to make his primacy more important. They must, then, have 
" been absolute strangers to ecclesiastical history ; or they must 
u have supposed, that the most eminent Popes, as St. Leo and 
" St. Gregory, neglected their rights, and suffered their dignity 
" to be debased : for it is a matter of fact, that they never exer- 
" cised the authority set forth in the Decretals — 

VIII. " Gratian's decree gave the finishing stroke to establish 
" the authority of the Decretals, which are cited and dispersed 
i( throughout his book. For more than three centuries, no other 
" canons were known than those contained in this compilation : 
" and no other were followed in the schools and in the tribu- 
" nals. Gratian had even gone beyond the Decretals in stretch- 



CHAP. IV.]] DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



137 



This exclusive right of granting missions on the 
part of his Latin holiness was, I suppose, one of 
the many remarkable things, which the Bishop of 
Strasbourg, on undeniable historical testimony, 
would deduce from Christ and his Apostles. If 
not totidem verbis, we at least may manage the 
matter totidem Uteris : and, let the worst come 
to the worst, if the totidem literce fail us, we still 
have in reserve, as a rod in pickle, the cum grano 
salis, 

V. The Bishop is very angry with me on the 
score of the poor calumniated Inquisition : and he 
says, that I have most woefully misrepresented 
him K 

If so, I have done it very unintentionally : and 
he has nothing to blame but his own equivocal 
coquetting with that diabolical institution. With 
most edifying gentleness does he lament, that 

" ing the Pope's power, maintaining that he was not subject to 
" the canons ; which he says of his own head, without proof or 
" voucher. Thus arose in the Latin Church a confused notion, 
" that the papal power had no bounds : and, from this principle 
" taken for granted, many consequences have been deduced 
" beyond the articles precisely expressed in the Decretals ; and 
" the new theologers have not sufficiently distinguished these 
" maxims from the essentials of the catholic faith, concerning 
" the primacy of the Pope and the ancient rules of discipline." 
Fleury in Jortin's Rem. on Eccles. Hist. vol. iii. p. 254—268. 

The Bishop will observe, that all this is said, not by an ap- 
prentice of Voltaire like the graceless Rector of Long-Newton, 
but by a divine of his country and communion. 

: Answer, p. 435 — 444. 



138 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[[CHAP. IV. 



things were managed in Spain not quite as they 
ought to have been : but still Spain, he thinks, 
has in the main been marvellously benefited by 
the wholesome paternal correction of the Holy 
Office. At all events, the merciful infallible 
Church is perfectly clear in this matter : and the 
political cruelties (bad enough, I admit, as civil 
processes) in the reign of our Elisabeth, who had 
been cursed and deposed and held up to Jesuitical 
assassination by the worthy fisherman at Rome, 
must in equity be viewed in the light of religious 
persecution, as a kind of heretical set off to the 
theological exploits of the Inquisitors. 

The reply to this ingenious glozing is abun- 
dantly evident. History testifies, that the head of 
Dr. Trevern's infallible and professedly immutable 
Church has never been backward in his interfer- 
ence, whenever he fancied that all was not quite 
right in re theologica. He could call upon his 
bloodhounds, with a voice of thunder, to exter- 
minate the maligned Albigenses and to worry the 
admirable Vallenses : but not a whisper could he 
utter to arrest the miserable bigot Philip and his 
meet tool Alva in their infernal work of destruc- 
tion. The Bishop claims to have accomplished 
great things. Let him try, then, to vindicate the 
total silence of the Pope respecting those two de- 
mons incarnate and their fitting delicice the Spa- 
nish Inquisition. If the Pope really judged the 
labours of that pair of hangmen to be abominable 
and detestable and practically heretical and utterly 



CHAP. IV.3 DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 139 

unchristian, why did he so shamelessly forget his 
arrogated duty as the head of the Catholic Church : 
why did he preserve a wicked and murderous and 
damnable silence ? On such a supposition, he 
ought to have cried aloud, and smitten on the 
thigh, and spared not. By the plenitude of his 
vicarial power, Christ's deputy upon earth ought 
to have instantly dissolved the Inquisition : and, 
by the same plenitude, he ought to have stayed 
the butcher hands of Philip and Alva and the gang 
of the Holy Office by the threat of immediate ex- 
communication, if they did not instantly desist 
from shedding as water the blood of their fellow- 
men. Had he thus acted, the grossness of his ec- 
clesiastical usurpation might have been at least 
extenuated by its practical utility : for, had he 
thus acted, will the Bishop pretend to tell us, that 
he would not instantly have been obeyed ? At all 
events, if obedience had been refused by the mon- 
sters, the alleged Vicar of Christ would have done 
his duty and would have delivered his soul. No- 
thing, however, of the sort occurred. The meek 
successor of St. Peter could halloo on Simon de 
Montfort, blithe as feudal baron in his forest, to 
the holy chase of persecution, with his recorded 
Eia, miles Christi, minister ium tuum imple 1 : but 
not a finger could he raise to stop Philip and his 
booted apostles and his horde of inquisitors. He 
approved of the bloody deeds of the Spanish tyrant 



1 Labb. Concil. vol. xi. par. i. p. 105. 



140 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



[CHAP. IV. 



and his satellites : and, 'by that approbation, he made 
their wickedness his own undoubted property. 

Let it, however, for a moment be granted, that 
Elisabeth's cruel political punishments of a knot 
of desperate traitors, who were seeking her very 
life in consequence of her excommunication and 
deposition by the Pope, were actually religious 
persecutions. What then ? How is the Bishop's 
vituperative argument benefited by such a con- 
cession ? Under the aspect of religious persecu- 
tion, we Anglicans, altogether unfettered by the 
wreathed chain of infallibility and immutability, 
would be the first to condemn whatever deeds of 
blood may unhappily, in wretched imitation of the 
Roman Church, have been perpetrated by any 
protestant government when just emerging from 
a school familiar with lessons of murder. Will 
the Bishop as readily and as strenuously condemn 
the deeds of his own communion, authorised by 
Popes, and even enjoined as a bounden duty 
under pain of excommunication by the infallible 
third and fourth Councils of Lateran 1 ? If he 
will not : nothing can be more idle, than the pre- 
tended parallelism, which modern Romanists, for 
very obvious reasons, are so fond of instituting. 
If he will: I should be glad to know, what be- 
comes of the infallibility and immutability of his 
unerring Church. 

1 Labb. Concil. vol, x. p. 1522, 1523. vol. xi. par. i. p. 
148—152. 



CHAP. IVJ DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



141 



But the Bishop says, that I misrepresent him 
in regard to the Inquisition. 

Why, then, did he stand, bowing, and smiling, 
and ogling that hideous disgrace of Christianity ? 
Why did he gently and affectionately palliate its 
monstrosities ? Why did he lovingly cover its 
nakedness with the mantle of misapplied charity ? 
Why did he tell us, that on the whole it had been 
a mighty benefit to preeminently pure and catho- 
lic Spain ? Why did he intimate, that, sooner or 
later, our protestant spirit of universal toleration 
would be fatal to the Anglican Church ; and that 
I myself anticipated and fruitlessly lamented its 
certain effects ? Why did he not, in short, speak 
out like a man ; and roundly and intelligibly de- 
nounce the Inquisition as the pet-child of Satan ? 
If the Bishop is pleased to amuse himself with 
making love to the Holy Office ; if it be his lord- 
ship's humour to tell a flattering tale to the grand 
Inquisitor and his grim Familiars : he must not 
turn round upon me with an assurance, that he 
means nothing serious, and that the whole is a 
mere sportive flirtation. 

VI. In my Difficulties of Romanism, I treated 
the Bishop, as some have thought, with even an 
exaggerated measure of kindness and urbanity : 
and how, in his Answer, has he repaid my for- 
bearance ? 

Ludicrously enough, it is true, but with griev- 
ous signs of irritability, his lordship, inter alia, 
styles me the unfortunate batchelor, and the ap- 



142 



SUPPLEMENT TO THE £CHAP. IV. 



prentice of Voltaire, and the oracle seated in 
Durham which may he consulted by the curious 
who wish to penetrate into the darkness of remote 
ages. Verily I have been a perfect martyr to my 
politeness : well may I exclaim, Et tu Brute f 
Had I endeavoured to support the Church of Eng- 
land by a brilliant and energetic display of envy, 
hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness : I might 
reasonably have anticipated the Bishop's then very 
equitable retort courteous, in exhibiting me, as 
who should say , I am Sir Oracle ; let no dog bark. 
But, when I recollect my own language, which 
really might have gained me some credit even at 
the court of Louis le grand, and (what is much 
better) which actually has gained me the praise of 
Mr. Butler : under such circumstances, the sus- 
tained, not accidental, phraseology of the Bishop, 
himself a Frenchman, and therefore preeminently 
a gentleman, fills me, at least with huge amaze- 
ment, if not with sore dismay. It is said, that the 
vanquished in controversy are apt to lose their 
temper. Possibly it may be so : but the theory 
of a defeat is plainly insufficient to account for the 
present phenomenon ; for Dr. Trevern himself 
assures us, that he is the undoubted victor. 

Yet, though an evident martyr to my polite- 
ness, I cannot regret it. From the Bishop's dis- 
courteous Answer, if I have learned nothing else, 
I have certainly received a practical lesson upon 
the exceeding great benefits of conciliation. 

" Grotius," says Dr. Jortin, " was inclined to 



CHAP. IVJ DIFFICULTIES OF ROMANISM. 



143 



u think and to judge, rather too favourably than 
" too hardly, of the Church of Rome : for which, 
" some of the ecclesiastics of that communion 
c< have repaid him with the gratitude that was to 
" be expected ; and have thus taught by-standers, 
" that he, who endeavours to stroke a tyger into 
" good humour, will at least have his fingers bitten 
" off in the experiment." 



THE END. 



LONDON : 

PRINTED BY R. GILBERT, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE. 



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